Friday, February 19, 2021

Good-bye Columbus Day and Crusaders

 "They brought us parrots and balls of cotton and spears and many other things, which they exchanged for the glass beads and hawks’ bells. They were well-built, with good bodies and handsome features…. They do not bear arms, and do not know them. They would make fine servants. With fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want." Christopher Columbus describing the Arawak people in Jamaica 

The city of Gary has changed the Columbus Day holiday into a celebration of Mayor Richard Hatcher. Because Hatcher was born just a week after July 4, the October date would remain the same. A day honoring Christopher Columbus, who never set foot on what became the United States, began in 1934 at the urging of Italian-Americans, but his enslavement of indigenous peoples has tarnished his reputation. Though some reactionaries decry the movement as an unfortunate example of “cancel culture," I’m all for removing the explorer from a national day in his honor. A half-century ago, some Gary residents wanted to change the name of their city to Du Sable in honor of the mixed-race French trader Jean Baptiste-Point Du Sable rather than the autocratic U.S. Steel board chairman Elbert H. Gary, but the effort fizzled out. Getting rid of Columbus Day locally seems more practical.

 

Some 54 communities are named Columbus or Columbia, the largest being Columbus, Ohio, and the District of Columbia. I don’t expect those names to change, but numerous statues of the controversial figure have been defaced or removed, including in Chicago. Columbia University in the Morningside Heights neighborhood of Manhattan is located not far from New York City’s Harlem. In the novel I’m presently reading, “The Dutch House” by Ann Patchett, the protagonist attends Columbia in 1968 at the time of a student revolt. Patchett wrote: “It was 1968 and Columbia was burning. The students rioted, marched, occupied. We were a microcosm of a country at war, and every day we held up the mirror to show the country what we saw.” When during that fateful spring, my adviser at the University of Maryland, Dr. H. Samuel Merrill, placed a call to a historian at Columbia, a student answered, saying, “You’ve reached the liberated offices of Columbia’s History Department.” Students had also taken over the President’s office, where they were displaying his pornography collection and sleeping on the floor before the police finally moved in. With Mayor Hatcher having taken office on January 1, 1968, Gary was one of the few cities to escape a racial uprising during that tumultuous year of Tet, Martin Luther King’s assassination, and other calamities.

 

VU Interim President Colette Irwin-Knott announced that the university is phasing out its Crusader mascot after both the student and faculty senates recommended such a course and a task force survey receiving 7,700 responses indicated that the symbol “is not reflective of Valpo’s mission to promote a welcoming and inclusive community.” President Irwin-Knott added: “Valpo is and always has been a faith-based institution, and we want to make sure our symbolism is in alignment with our beliefs and core values of the Lutheran ethos.” Adopted in 1942, “Crusaders” replaced the previous mascot, “Uhlans,” originally light infantry Polish lancers, after enemy German units called themselves Uhlans. A NWI Times article indicated that efforts to change the name have been ongoing for many years but that opponents claimed that the university was caving to a “cancel culture” mentality.

 

2009 Valpo grad and Chicago Bulls announcer Adam Amin argued: “If the symbol that happens to represent Valparaiso University makes people feel some sort of negative cognition, then change it.” Post-Trib columnist Jerry Davich asked followers to weigh in on the topic. Most agreed that change was welcome although a few detractors responded with epithets such as “morons” and “leftist shitbags.” Purdue Northwest archivist Joseph Coates, a former student of mine and IUN grad, wrote: “Crusaders were soldiers who fought in series of religious wars initiated, supported, and sometimes directed by the Latin (Roman Catholic) Church in the medieval period. They sacked and burned cities, including Constantinople, and murdered 10s if not 100s of thousands of people in the name of conquest under God. Lutherans never went on crusades. It was a weird choice of mascot for sure.” I replied: Joseph Coates put the issue in context perfectly. The Pope even gave the Crusaders dispensation for atrocities they committed, not only against Muslims but Orthodox Catholics in Constantinople. “Cancel Culture” is a rightwing trope, like “politically incorrect,” to justify accepting injustice. Some things (i.e., Columbus Day, Fort Benning, Washington Redskins logo) need to be retired. Anders Tomchek noted: “A Christian school having their team be the crusaders is the same as an Islamic school naming their team the jihadists.”

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