Janey declares Monday Indigenous Peoples Day; Edwards objects

“Act like one
Get treated like one”

What do you have against girls?

Oct 12 was Discovery Day until 2013, now it is National Heroes Day. There are variations on Columbus Day in many countries, from Italy, the Caribbean, and Latin America.

...but he was not Italian-American.

Columbus was in command of a Spanish expedition and subsequently served as a Spanish governor. His celebration by the Italian-American community is a bit peculiar; he was the agent of a conquering autocracy and never fought for freedom, unlike, say, Giuseppe Garibaldi. Nor did Columbus play any role in the history of the English colonies that subsequently formed the United States. He no more deserves celebration by Italian-Americans than Konstantin Rokossowski does by Polish-Americans.

There was no such thing as "Italian" in the fifteenth century. Columbus was Genoese, a citizen of a city-republic with its own small empire. His native language was Genoese, a dialect of Ligurian, which is more closely related to Spanish than it is to Italian. Of course, Spain didn't exist, as a country, in Columbus's day, either; Ferdinand and Isabella were monarchs of Aragon and Castile, respectively, not of a united Spain. All of which illustrates why trying to impose modern national identities on people who lived a half a millennium ago is such a useless enterprise.

It's ok

for Proto Indo-European Americans?

There’s been a lot written about Italian marginalization and subsequent assimilation, but this 2019 article by Brent Staples talks further of the New Orleans lynchings, Columbus Day, and how Italians “became” white.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/10/12/opi...

Racist dogma about Southern Italians found fertile soil in the United States. As the historian Jennifer Guglielmo writes, the newcomers encountered waves of books, magazines and newspapers that “bombarded Americans with images of Italians as racially suspect.” They were sometimes shut out of schools, movie houses and labor unions, or consigned to church pews set aside for black people. They were described in the press as “swarthy,” “kinky haired” members of a criminal race and derided in the streets with epithets like “dago,” “guinea” — a term of derision applied to enslaved Africans and their descendants — and more familiarly racist insults like “white n*****” and “n***** wop.”