A recent news story reported that President Trump authorized a statue of Christopher Columbus, reconstructed from pieces destroyed by protesters, to be placed on the White House lawn.
This is the latest effort to whitewash the reality of Columbus and the ensuing European morphing into the American decimation of the indigenous population of the Americas and the Caribbean. The full story, which most high school history classes gloss over or ignore, is horrifying and needs to be told.
It always struck me as odd that Italians and those of Italian heritage embraced Columbus. Although he was born in Italy, he could not get the financial support there and went to Spain. Then he got lost, finding not a different route to India but an entirely unknown continent and civilization.
He then promptly reported to Spain that this area was filled with gold, populated by a compliant and docile people, and ripe for exploitation. Writing the following on return from his first voyage.
” The inhabitants . . . are all, as I said before, unprovided with any sort of iron, and they are destitute of arms, which are entirely unknown to them, and for which they are not adapted; not on account of any bodily deformity, for they are well made, but because they are timid and full of terror. . . . But when they see that they are safe, and all fear is banished, they are very guileless and honest, and very liberal of all they have. No one refuses the asker anything that he possesses; on the contrary they themselves invite us to ask for it. They manifest the greatest affection towards all of us, exchanging valuable things for trifles, content with the very least thing or nothing at all. . . . I gave them many beautiful and pleasing things, which I had brought with me, for no return whatever, in order to win their affection, and that they might become Christians and inclined to love our King and Queen and Princes and all the people of Spain; and that they might be eager to search for and gather and give to us what they abound in and we greatly need.” (March 15, 1493, letter announcing his discoveries to King Ferdinand and Queen)
What Columbus did was set in motion the subjugation and wholesale slaughter, through a combination of disease, slavetaking, and warfare, of the indigenous population. All in the name of the King and Queen of Spain and Christianity. You’ll understand my confusion as to why Italians would embrace such a history.
According to the book American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World, by David Stannard, over the first century after the arrival of Columbus and other Europeans, 85-90% of the indigenous population was dead. Many died from diseases reflecting the ignorance of germ theory. But, even if we hold the Europeans blameless for their ignorance of science, millions of indigenous people were systematically killed for their land, in the pursuit of gold, or through brutal labor as slaves.
“Just twenty-one years after Columbus’s first landing in the Caribbean, the vastly populous island that the explorer had renamed Hispaniola was effectively desolate; nearly 8,000,000 people—those Columbus chose to call Indians—had been killed by violence, disease, and despair.”
“The destruction of the Indians of the Americas was, far and away, the most massive act of genocide in the history of the world.”
Stannard, David E., American Holocaust: Columbus and the Conquest of the New World . Oxford University Press. Kindle Edition.
It is troubling that we would honor such a person, despite their direct contribution to this devastation, with a statue and place it on the very symbol of America’s professed embrace of equality. It reflects this administration’s policy of revisionary American history. An attempt at presenting a kinder and gentler picture while ignoring reality.
And Columbus was just the beginning.
With the rise of the United States, this systematic and intentional devastation of Native Americans continued. One startling example is the forced relocation, ordered by the President and conducted by American Army troops, of thousands of Cherokee during what became known as the Trail of Tears. Of the 16,000 Cherokee—men, women, and children—forced on this march, 6000-8000 died. The death rate matched the number of Americans who died during the Bataan Death March, one of the worst of the Japanese atrocities during World War II.
We don’t need to teach these truths to denigrate America. We need to teach this history in the appropriate historical context to understand the need to never let greed and ignorance drive our actions. To ignore it, or bury it in wishful revisionist tracts, should be an anathema to our embracing the truth.
A Critique of Whitewashing American History
The deliberate minimization of slavery, racism, and prejudice in American historical education represents not a neutral or balanced approach, but an active distortion of the historical record. When legislators, school boards, and curriculum designers scrub references to systemic racism from textbooks, ban books that center the experiences of enslaved people, or reduce centuries of brutal oppression to a footnote in an otherwise triumphant national narrative, they are not protecting students — they are deceiving them. Slavery was not a peripheral episode in American history; it was foundational to the nation’s economic development, political architecture, and social order. The Constitution itself encoded it. The wealth generated by enslaved labor underwrote the industrial revolution, financed universities, and built the infrastructure of a modern nation. To teach American history without that truth at its center is to teach a myth, and myths, however comforting, cannot survive contact with reality.
The consequences of this willful ignorance extend far beyond the classroom. When young people—particularly young people of color—confront the lived reality of racial inequality without any historical framework to explain it, they are left without the tools to understand their own society. Racism did not end with the Emancipation Proclamation, nor with the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Its roots run through Reconstruction’s betrayal, the terror of Jim Crow, redlining, mass incarceration, and voter suppression — a continuous thread that cannot be understood in isolation from its origins. Dismissing honest engagement with this history as “divisive” or “unpatriotic” is itself a political act, one that serves to preserve existing power structures by keeping citizens ignorant of how those structures were built. A democracy cannot meaningfully reckon with its present without an honest accounting of its past, and no genuine patriotism is served by a sanitized lie.
This revisionist trend, fueled by Christian nationalism, fervent isolationism, and willful disregard for the truth, sets us on a dangerous course. Failing to recognize what humans are capable of doing, especially by ignoring the reality of history, risks our repeating the same mistakes.
America should be rightfully proud of the good we have done in the world. One way to embrace that is to accept that we made mistakes and benefited from the enslavement and brutal treatment of others, and strive to never let that happen again. We can do that only if we have an open, factual historical background, not one shaped by politics.
You know he is Rhode Island’s patron saint, he will never go away.