Why I Blogged Today, Even Though Columbus Day was Yesterday

Anyone who has followed my blog over the last several months would’ve noticed that I don’t blog on weeks of federal holidays. It was a practice I started with Independence Day and Labor Day, and I will continue this habit with Veterans Day, Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s Day in the next few weeks.

But this practice will not extend to Columbus Day. Not this year, and probably not ever.

The reason is that, quite honestly, this blog is supposed to expose injustices instead of celebrate them. As a result, I felt that not posting for the week of Columbus Day would be a de facto celebration of Columbus and a number of injustices related to him and the way he is celebrated.

I am not going to go into all of the injustices related to Columbus, but here are a few:

1. When Columbus got involved in “America” (which wasn’t actually America but places in the Caribbean like Haiti), he and his people enslaved many, treated many people brutally, and saw many people die as a result of mistreatment from him and those who helped him. It’s fair to say that people in the West Indies weren’t exactly flourishing while he was the governor there.
2. Columbus and his entourage claimed the land for themselves, even though other people were on the territory many years before they “discovered” it. This sort of claiming of land is not worth celebrating.
3. The way Columbus treated indigenous people in America started a pattern of how Europeans often brutally treated indigenous people in the New World. In other words, this pattern of mass enslavement and brutality against indigenous people continued for many years after Columbus died. Basically, Columbus was a trendsetter in all the wrong ways. This is also nothing to be celebrated.
4. Brutality aside, he was not the first person to discover America, because that was actually done many centuries before Columbus went on his voyage. For that matter, he was not even the first European to discover America, as there is strong evidence of a Viking presence in Newfoundland. Actually, Columbus never even landed in mainland North America, in spite of the continuously popular myth of his “discovering” America. So Columbus Day is a holiday that is built on all sorts of false premises about what he “discovered.” As a result, even the way he is celebrated is, in a way, unjust.

I am not a scholar on Christopher Columbus, so people can probably find even more reasons, on both sides of this argument, about why he should or should not be celebrated. But these are a few of the big reasons why I will not celebrate him by having an “off week” on this blog.

Instead, I hope to use the week of Columbus Day in future years to do as I’ve always tried to do here: discuss injustices which many of us may be blind to or blindly commit.