California legislative leaders on Tuesday announced on Tuesday that a statue paying tribute to Christopher Columbus and Queen Isabella will be removed from the state Capitol after 137 years.
Maybe they can replace it with a statue of Ishi.
I’d be happy if they just scrub everyone from current who has connections to slavery, like a certain Senate Majority Leader who has slave-owning ancestors…
Well maybe a competition between Ishi and John Muir?
I have found that “antes de Colon…” enters the language of Spanish speakers in this Hemisphere in more conversations than among English ones…and it’s not all complementary to Chris…
So is Moscow Mitch saying that we need to put up statues of Hitler, Stalin and Pol Pot, because not having them is “airbrushing” history? Or just Putin, his bestest friend in the world?
Perfectly appropriate. Columbus never got anywhere near California.
(Whatever else you may think of him, Columbus was a great mariner. And the purpose for his first trip was to find a way to the fabled Indies for trade, not to enslave people.)
Cage fight?
Maybe they can alternate, one on the even number years, and the other on the odd.
But, a cage fight requires both participants to be in the cage at the same time!
A pretty easy choice given tenuous ties to California history. The real target of California reform should be Father JunĂpero Serra whose image plagues the length of the state.
Many of us have slave-owning ancestors. All Americans are infected with the latent virus of slavery.
I guess to bad about Queen Isabella, a quite interesting historical figure. She was married to Ferdinand, King of Aragon, Sicily and Naples. But she did get to rule her realm the Kingdom of Castille & Leon (there was no Spain yet) a very shrewdly at that. But the ethnic cleansing of Moorish people was not a good thing.
The Kingdom of Aragon was richer than Castille, but Aragon had a parliament of sorts (Cortes) that could tell the King to take a hike when trying to raise money and frequently did so. In Castille the rule by the queen was direct and much easier to raise money. That is the reason the Latin Americans speak Castilian and not Catalan or Aragonese.
Speak for yourself.
Columbus was wrong in a number of thing. But more important he was cruel, greedy and a Trump-grade liar and self-promoter, even by the standards of his time. He was sent back to Spain in chains after his third voyage because among other things excessive cruelty towards the natives .
Well I found this article on the Yale Dept. of Astronomy, trying to have a town hall by email discussion on racism to be as expected when it’s a bunch of old white guys, at an Ivy, excusing their department’s lack of color. I even like that one professor emeritus apparently hasn’t quite gotten over the 1970s and women’s rights.
There I’m going to disagree solidly. With parts of the family history that were always Northerners, and the majority of the rest who came much later from Europe, I’ve got no personal guilt buried in any of the known family tree.
In the UK, a mob defaced a statue of Winston Churchill because he was a racist. It is undeniable that Churchill was an unapologetic imperialist and a racist. But he was also a great war leader who was warning about Hitler while everyone else looked the other way.
Same here.
I think whereever that statue ends up, they should amputate the hands as a symbolic gesture representing one of Columbus’ forms of punishment that he had handed out to the the natives for relatively trivial slights.