Support grows to rename Columbus Day

[shenmue]

http://www.cnn.com/2016/10/09/us/columbus-day-indigenous-peoples-day/index.html

[VMA131Marine]

1. I'd be good with that.

Columbus didn't discover North America anyway.

[KamaAina]

4. The famed Yale Precision Marching Band trolled New Haven's Columbus Day parade decades ago

which is a rather big deal, as New Haven is home to the Knights of Columbus.

The YPMB marched down Chapel Street with a message taped on the big bass drum: "Leif Erikson Was First".

They have not been invited back since.

[The2ndWheel]

10. Was North America North America at the time?

It only became North America after. Other than land mass, there's nothing to call it, since there was no single name for it.

[KamaAina]

2. Columbus Day never did cut it in Hawai'i

where Columbus has no relevance whatsoever. They tried renaming it Discoverers' Day, then ditched it altogether a few years later. Not to worry; they have plenty of Hawai'i-specific holidays, like Kamehameha Day, Prince Kuhio Day, and Statehood Day.

[rockfordfile]

3. It's about time

[iandhr]

5. It's also worth noting that Viking traders reached...

... what is now Newfoundland almost 500 years before Columbus.

[Igel]

7. Lots of things were "discovered" before they were discovered.

But if you discover something and that knowledge dies, it's a failed discovery worthy of little more than a footnote.

The Arabs get most of the credit for discovering the zero, which was in a manuscript looted during the Islamic conquest of N. India and expropriated for export back to the Middle East. The Arabs made use of it; the Indians basically left it as a nice oddity in the manuscript.

Same with some treatments of infinity and its uses by the Greeks. This was discovered in a palimpsest a number of years back. If there's no continuity, then it's an individual discovering something and not that discovery being made known to a civilization.

I was reading about the guy who discovered stainless steel. He managed to create it, he managed to get it into use by a company, but then the idea spread and it was made famous not for his uses, but for other uses. And, if I recall correctly, not by the company he worked for, at which it was a little backwater of production used for certain things few cared about.

Darwin wasn't the first to publish his theory. And the idea of natural selection and speciation had been floating around in diaries and letters and sermons (even) for a few decades before he published. Including in sources that Darwin had access to and probably benefited from.

At other times, it's worth noting, true discoveries are overlooked. For example, Arabs found a rich source of black slaves that they exported for centuries, keeping their source fairly secret until the Portuguese figured out where the slave ships originated. Yet who gets the credit for that active slave trade? The Iberians. And who gets blamed for less than 5% of the trade? The US.

[TygrBright]

6. Oh, goody! I've always wanted to celebrate "genocide day"... ::IRONY ALERT:: n/t

[aikoaiko]

8. I support Indigenous Peoples Day

[Drahthaardogs]

11. Columbus Day should be renamed but not for

indigenous people. Columbus Day was made a national holiday to honor Italian American people who suffered a generation of institutional racism at the hands of the whites already living in America.

The largest mass lynching in America was in New Orleans and involved the mass execution of southern italian immigrants. Theodore Roosevelt called it a good thinng.

Congress passed a low outlawing immigration from southern Europe. State's sent out workers to ensure that the garlic eaters would abandon their traditional foods.

Eventually italians became "white" and Columbus Day was mad a national holiday to honor italian americans. October is National Italian American month.

I really wish people would do a little reading and understand why it was made a National Holiday. Italian americans should get to keep their day. If they want to rename it something, so be it. However, it should remain a holiday honoring and remembering the institutionalized racism that was perpetuated against italian americans