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/opinion/columbus-day-ital...

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.”

A very convenient coincidence for the Irish-American political class to curry favor with their enormous Irish-American constituency.

From Wikipedia:

A 1941 law establishing the holiday in Suffolk County was signed in both black and green ink.

At least Patriots' Day is shared by the state of Maine

Probably because, at that time, Maine didn't exist. It was part of Massachusetts.

Oh yes a coincidence! Totally has nothing to do with the by then twenty year old Saint Patrick's Day parade and huge Irish population boom.

It was a convenient way to tip a hat to people like my great grand parents without upsetting the upper classes at the time or stepping on the whole religious aspect of Patrick being a saint "no no no, it's a revolutionary war thing... Yes I know we have Patriots Day and Bunker Hill Day and yes the 4th of July..."

It also helps that the Irish are generally not the biggest fans of England as a country so selling them on using Evacuation Day as a cover most likely wasn't that hard.