Goodbye Columbus
By PETER MAURICE
(Editor’s Note: Peter Maurice has written for Gilbert magazine.)
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On the second Monday of October, schools were closed in Berkeley, Calif., in homage to “Indigenous People’s Day.” Here in flyover country, 30 miles out of St. Louis, it was business as usual. The suburban high school, where I was subbing in advanced placement European and American history classes, neither endorses nor opposes traditional celebrations.
It does, however, refuse to particularize them. On “Presidents’ Day” students are free to celebrate the achievements of Millard Fillmore, Jimmy Carter, or George Washington — according to taste. Christmas and Easter have been bumped in favor of the more inclusive seasonal terms — “Winter Break” and “Spring Holiday.”
These ecumenical tags may have a neutered and shifty ring in traditionalist ears, but they are thought to accommodate the sensibilities of a diverse school population. The one holiday that defies the impersonal custom is MLK Day — Martin Luther King being, apparently, the only hero whose name doesn’t risk controversy. As for the brave admiral, in whose honor students used to recite eulogies, only a numeral marks his block on the school calendar.
Before the AP European history class arrived, I read over the handout from the previous day’s class — “Socratic Seminar: European Exploration.” A black swatch over one quarter of the right page showed how the book had been pressed against the copier; the rest of this side was x-ed out. The teacher must have thought that the clear, left page — just half of “Columbus’ Letter Describing His First Voyage” — sufficient for historical perspective.
This page contained Columbus’ description of a naked, peaceable tribe, sharing goods and food stuffs in brotherly harmony. But enough of the canceled text remained to discover a different tribe, one of merciless cannibals, who terrorized their gentle neighbors, and sometimes ate them. Diversity, it seems, existed even at the dawn of the Age of Exploration.
The final page of the study packet concluded with three prompts for test preparation and class discussion: A) Describe differences between European and American societies. Provide examples. B) Big Idea Question: How should European explorers be viewed by historians? C) Post-reading question: Should we as a nation celebrate Columbus Day? If not, why should we drop it from our list of holidays? Based on the selective text and guided discussion, one could guess that here in the “conservative” heartland, as in progressive Berkeley, Columbus would not be missed.
As they bubbled in answers to their 14-page multiple choice Scantron test, I patrolled the room, monitoring the students and taking in the décor — the posters, the displays, and photos, the selections for the class library. The largest poster promoted “DIVERSITY” above a gnomic quotation from Joseph Campbell: “The privilege of a lifetime is being who you are.”
But here in this classroom one searched in vain for diversity. The NEA conference mementos and posters, the book jackets stapled to the bulletin board, and the books selected to supplement the text — all of them — bespoke monolithic uniformity: Under the Banner of Heaven warned of “the dark side of Mormonism”; Terror in the Mind of God illustrated the varieties of religious experience with cover photos of Tim McVeigh and Osama bin Laden; The Fundamentals of Extremism: The Christian Right in America left Richard Dawkins “stunned” and “horrified” at “America’s Taliban”; Helen Ellerbe’s The Dark Side of Christian History encapsulated two thousand years of this “sexist” and “racist” religion — “the crusades, the Inquisition, witch hunts, etc.”
Was this “dark” one-sided, anti-religious propaganda perhaps justified as — again from Ellerbe’s blurb – “a counterbalance to the more devotional titles in most religious collections”? However, a search of the shelves turned up only more of the same; none of these supposedly more common, pious titles. No Apologia Pro Vita Sua, no Introduction to the Devout Life.
The two millennia of Christian history purveyed in this classroom showed but one facet – “the dark side.” The only counterbalance to all of these scary black and red covers with lightning-strike lettering reposed in the secular realm. Titles like The Culture of Fear: Why Americans Are Afraid of the Wrong Things assured the reader that, unlike religion, “drugs, killer kids, teen moms, crime. . . .” were mere chimeras. Another upbeat title suggested that our darker angels need not prevail — if only we could summon The Audacity of Hope.
After the last student had completed his bubbling, ten minutes remained, enough time to discuss the questions from yesterday’s preparation packet. What did they make of Columbus? Did anyone think there should be a day set aside to honor him? Of the 20 or so students present, only one boy raised his hand, tentatively; and withdrew it when he saw, or sensed, the disdain.
Well, why didn’t Columbus deserve a day? Wasn’t there something to admire? What about his hope, his audacity? One student spoke up, and I felt that she drew confidence from the sentiment of her peers. No, she said, Columbus didn’t deserve a day. He was “a murderer” — and he didn’t even find what he was looking for; also, he was “Eurocentric” — he wanted to convert the natives.
“The first American? No, not quite./ But he was brave and he was bright.”
In an era that feels almost as remote as the Age of Exploration, students used to recite such rhymes to honor the great discoverer of the New World. Now they know that Columbus was not great; that this new world was only new to him; and that those vast land masses that he ignorantly thought “the Indies” would really have been much better off if he had minded his own business.
Today, in the heartland as on the coasts, callow cynicism, it seems, has replaced naive admiration. “Great men,” especially dead white Europeans, are a bit of an embarrassment. Liberated from the oppressive shadow of giants, the young are freer to celebrate themselves — and indigenous peoples. In the sanguine view of the multiculturalist educator, this iconoclasm is the inevitable result of those improved critical thinking skills endlessly touted in professional development sessions.
But might such an approach close more minds than it opens? After all, why would the students trouble to dig deeper when, at a glance, they have seen through to the rotten, ethnocentric core? Admiration, even hero worship, on the other hand, stimulates curiosity and further inquiry, which may eventually lead to a more critical appreciation. But, of course, it might lead to the reactionary belief that Western Civ deserves pride of place in those bulging, multicultural texts. And who wants to go back to those days of uncritical thinking?
