Is Saying Columbus “Discovered America” a Racist Claim?
By: Sam Heath
Tags: Culture, Race, Equality, Society, History

Is Saying Columbus “Discovered America” a Racist Claim?

We neither need to erase nor flaunt history

Christopher Columbus landing in Santo Domingo. Image from Wikipedia Commons.

The high school where I teach history had a world-renowned violinist recently come and play for our students. It was beautiful and moving, and I was struck once again by the power of music to move people and unite. However, twice in her interlude discussions, the musician referenced “when Columbus discovered America” as she was placing within history some of the pieces she played.

I jolted in my seat a bit, for I had not heard this at my school in awhile. I had taught Columbus and his journey to my students for years, but the narrative I gave them did not include saying that Columbus discovered anything.

Hearing her utter these words brought to my mind a new question. I knew that believing Columbus “discovered America” was not historically accurate, but was that phrase more sinister than that?

Was saying that Columbus “discovered America” a racist claim?

Image from Wikipedia Commons

In many ways, racism is like plagiarism. Something else I tell my students is that plagiarism is blind to intent. Whether or not someone means to plagiarize is beside the point. If a student takes three or more words from a source and does not give a citation, that is plagiarism — even if the student did not mean to do it.

Like plagiarism, then, or speeding on the highway, racism is blind to intent. Put another way, someone can be a racist and not mean to do it. One’s intention does not mitigate against the effect of the claim or action.

I will use Ture and Hamilton’s definition of racism: “Racism is not merely exclusion on the basis of race but exclusion for the purpose of subjugating or maintaining subjugation.”

Consider the three boats that set sail from Spain. Remember the poem?

In fourteen hundred ninety-two Columbus sailed the ocean blue.

You are probably like me in not knowing that the poem goes on and on and on, approaching its end with

Columbus sailed on to find some gold To bring back home, as he’d been told.

It would be accurate to add to the end a new line:

Many natives he shipped and sold.

‘Landing of Columbus’ frieze from the U.S. Capitol Building. Image from Public Domain Files.

To say Columbus “discovered America” is problematic, and likely a racist claim, in at least three ways:

Columbus did not discover America. There were people already here. Native Americans occupied the land for untold thousands of years before Columbus set foot on the Bahamas. There were potentially hundreds of millions of natives in the Americas. To say Columbus “discovered” something implicitly communicates that he did this for humanity, which excludes the natives from humanity and equates “humanity” only with Europeans. Columbus, on behalf of the Spanish crown, was not the first European here. Leif Erikson and the Vikings were, by hundreds of years. The claim is incorrect even when considering a Eurocentric point of view. Columbus was a colonial conqueror who inaugurated a racist genocide that resulted in the near-extinction of the native population. Between smallpox, war, and outright murder, there were few natives left a couple of generations later. The contact between Columbus and the natives in the Bahamas elicited a colonial-era of abuse and exploitation. After all, what else is colonization?

A 197 foot monument of Columbus in Barcelona. Image from nosolomarcas on Pixabay.

Columbus sold Native Americans to Spain, an act that was both genesis of and forerunner to a global slave trade that culminated with the United States of America holding on to its forced labor system until 1865 and the requisite white supremacy through the present day.

Columbus initiated a story whose conclusion we still await but whose rising action was foreshadowed by his diary entry for Ferdinand and Isabella, the king and queen of Spain: “With fifty men all can be kept in subjection, and made to do whatever you desire.”

That entry was prescient.

Bernardino de Sahagun, a Franciscan priest, in his General History of Things in New Spain, told of an event in 1519 involving the Spanish attacking the natives:

There followed a butchery of stabbing, beating, killing of the unsuspecting [natives] armed with no bows and arrows, protected by no shields…with no warning, they were treacherously, deceitfully slain.

Bartolomé de las Casas, who saw Columbus return to Spain in 1493 when Las Casas was eight years old, wrote the 1542 book A Short Account of the Destruction of the Indies. Las Casas fiercely fought for the protection of the natives and exposed many of the Spanish evils. Of Spanish engagement with the natives, he wrote

The Christians, with their horses and swords and lances, began to slaughter and practice strange cruelty among them. They penetrated into the country and spared neither children nor the aged, nor pregnant women, nor those in child labour, all of whom they ran through the body and lacerated.

The cover of de las Casas’ book. Image from Wikipedia Commons.

Las Casas, though he later regretted this, suggested to Spain that they import Africans rather than Native Americans.

For all of these reasons and more, cities, including my own, Charlottesville, have voted not to recognize Columbus Day. Rather, they celebrate Indigenous Peoples Day the second Monday of each October, the traditional date for Columbus Day, as a way to remember and honor Native Americans.

Indigenous Peoples Day in Berkeley. Image from Wikipedia Commons.

The idea that Columbus and his efforts are worth celebrating is misguided at best, racist at worst.

It seems a racist claim to say that Columbus “discovered America,” for he did not; not only that, what he did do was colonize, steal humans and sell them, and begin a cycle of corruption that required United States’ bloodiest war to interrupt. That cycle continues in a different, renewed form. While bodies are no longer taken to the auction block and sold in America, bodies of color are maligned, stereotyped, mass incarcerated, ignored, redlined, and shot.

Saying Columbus “discovered America” forefronts a false claim and glorifies a man who helped inaugurate race-based slavery and genocide in the United States.

To reference Ture and Hamilton’s definition of racism, to disregard the native population (much less slaughter them) is indeed “exclusion” and “subjugating or maintaining subjugation.”

By Ibram Kendi’s standards — author of How to Be an Anti-Racist — this claim about Columbus is racist if it perpetuates inequity, which a false narrative certainly can do. Inequity can come from continued racist policies against Native Americans based on the non-indigenous assumption that “this land is my land.”

If saying that Columbus “discovered America” is not a racist claim, it is certainly close by.

While bodies are no longer taken to the auction block and sold in America, bodies of color are maligned, stereotyped, mass incarcerated, ignored, redlined, and shot.

What Columbus discovered was new depths of evil in the human heart.

It is not just that a new generation is thinking something new and that now we have to get on board with the youngsters and be politically correct or else be labeled a racist. That line of thinking ignores the fact that most people of color have always thought phrases like saying Columbus “discovered America” were harmful. Really, what has happened is that white people, which is to say those in positions of power, are the ones thinking differently.

People of color, particularly African Americans, have pleaded with whites to engage the truth.

Duke Divinity School professor Patrick Smith says, “There cannot be a way forward without a profound truth telling.”

Founder and president of Be the Bridge, LaTasha Morrison, says, “Reconciliation doesn’t happen without truth telling.”

Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Equal Justice Initiative, says, “Truth and reconciliation are sequential.”

John M. Perkins, civil rights activist and author of One Blood, writes, “We must go back before we can go forward.”

Civil rights activist John M. Perkins. Image from Wikipedia Commons.

And Jemar Tisby, author of The Color of Compromise, writes that what we learn from history is “that there can be no reconciliation without repentance. There can be no repentance without confession. And there can be no confession without truth.”

The truth is that Columbus Day reinforces a dangerous story, one that is dangerous not just because it is false but because it is wretched. Columbus’ actions and what he initiated are patterns from which America still needs to recover.

We need not erase history, but we do not need to flaunt it.

Truth-telling is a baseline requirement for living into reality. We need to truth-tell about what really happened in 1492 and what did not, about what is worth celebrating and what is not. Otherwise, we will live in the Upside Down and think our wrong-headed notions are right side up.

We need not erase history, but we do not need to flaunt it.

We need to add new lines to the famous 1492 poem: