The movie “Goodbye, Columbus” was released in 1969 starring Richard Benjamin and Ali MacGraw. Its name was derived from Ali MacGraw’s film brother who was disconsolate because his glory days as a basketball star at Ohio State were over.

While the title “Goodbye, Columbus” referred to the brother’s time at Ohio State located in Columbus Ohio, many now want to say “Goodbye” to Christopher Columbus because of the treatment of indigenous people he encountered.

In the United States, at least 25 counties, cities and towns have the name Columbus or Columbia. Columbus is the capital of Ohio; Columbia is the capital of South Carolina; and the capital of the nation is Washington, District of Columbia. Since 1968, Columbus Day has been a federal holiday, celebrated on the second Monday in October which also happens to be Canadian Thanksgiving Day. 

The first Columbus Day celebration took place on October 12, 1792 when the Columbian Order of New York held an event to commemorate the 300th anniversary of the Columbus’ Landing. If the Declaration of Columbus Day as a federal holiday in 1968 was the high water mark for honoring Christopher Columbus, his reputation has taken a nosedive in the last 20 years because of his treatment of indigenous people.

150 years ago, the opposition to Columbus Day came from anti-immigrant and anti-Catholic nativists, including the Ku Klux Klan, who sought to eliminate the celebration because of its association with immigrants from Catholic countries and with the American Catholic fraternal organization, the Knights of Columbus.

The present objection to Columbus Day may be more effective than the earlier objection.  Just this month, President Biden proclaimed that October 11^th would be recognized as Indigenous Peoples’ Day by the federal government.  In many parts of the country Columbus Day has been refashioned into Indigenous People Day. Even Columbus, Ohio now celebrates Columbus Day not as a tribute to Columbus but as a tribute to veterans. Columbus’ encounters with indigenous people is more nuanced than is currently depicted. The Taino tribe was friendly and non-threatening but the Carib tribe was threatening and aggressive and, according to the Tainos, practiced cannibalism against their enemies, a position that Columbus came to believe. Nevertheless, both were enslaved by the Spanish under Columbus.

In July 2020, during the George Floyd protests, the statue of Christopher Columbus in the Little Italy section of Baltimore was pulled down and rolled into the harbor. That statue had been dedicated in 1984 by President Ronald Reagan. The most “woke” member of the Baltimore City Council, Ryan Dorsey, tweeted “Bye.” The Baltimore Sun, a pale shadow of a once fine newspaper, opined that Columbus did not really discover America since he did not land on the mainland. The Sun has now been taken over by Alden Capital which will likely result in layoffs and, hopefully, one of the first to go is the moron who wrote that sentence.

Five of the first seven presidents of the United States owned slaves during their presidency and that was 300 years after Columbus had enslaved indigenous people. Most of these presidents were opposed to slavery but not so opposed that they gave up their slaves. Indeed, Jefferson, who had 600 slaves, bedded Sally Hemmings who produced a number of children who did not have his surname.

So what to make of the slave makers and slave owners? In large part, they were a product of their times where slavery was normal. At the same time, most instinctively knew that slavery was wrong.

The real issue is how do we treat historical figures who engaged in lamentable behavior but, at the same time, made significant contributions.

Columbus’ voyages were remarkable as were the voyages of another Italian, Amerigo Vespucci, for whom the newly discovered continents were named. Imagine the fortitude necessary to sail 3,000 miles over open ocean without nautical charts, much less GPS, in the hope of finding land. Thomas Jefferson not only gave us the Declaration of Independence but founded the University of Virginia and, as President, negotiated the Louisiana Purchase which expanded the new nation westward and included approximately a third of the present country.

There is no reason that we cannot celebrate both Columbus and Indigenous People. Recently, the town of Franklin, Tennessee erected a “March to Freedom” memorial honoring the black enslaved men who joined The United States Colored Troops, a segregated unit of the Union Army, which fought with the Union in the Civil War. The town already had a memorial to Confederate soldiers which could not be taken down because of ownership issues and provisions of state law. Hence, those who objected to the Confederate soldier monument found a provocative way to even the playing field with a monument directly across the street from the Confederate monument.

There is no question that the indigenous people in the New Continent got the short end of the stick, time after time.  The American Indians were either eradicated or forced into reservations which always contained the least desirable land.  At the same time hundreds of thousands of European immigrants – “yearning to be free” – passed the Statue of Liberty and populated the country.

If you are a descendant of an American Indian you will never believe that what happened was “right” because it wasn’t. If, however, you are a descendant of immigrants you are probably grateful for the life you’ve been given. That doesn’t mean that you cannot recognize injustice but it does mean that you are not personally responsible and feeling guilt helps no one. Trying to eradicate the present day consequences of the injustices is more important than anything.

Unfortunately, the demand to admit “guilt” – even when you are not guilty ‒ occurs too often. Condolezza Rice, the first black female Secretary of State, was recently a guest on The View. She was asked about the critical race theory debate and she said: “One of the worries that I have about the way we’re talking about race…[is that somehow] white people have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past.” In order for black kids to be empowered, you “don’t have to make white kids feel bad for being white.”

The criticism of Rice’s comments was fierce and she was accused of being a “soldier for white supremacy.” This should be news to Ms. Rice who herself was a victim of segregated schools as a child. The current “progressive” position seems to be that whites have to feel guilty even if they are not guilty because, somewhere in the distant past, some ancestor may have been guilty. This is nonsense of the highest order. Implied guilt is not productive as argued by John McWhorter in his column in the New York Times entitled “The Former Secretary of State is Right About the Inutility of White Guilt” (see reprinted article below).

This country’s founding document, The Constitution, began by stating that its goal was to form a “more perfect union.” That is still a work in progress. So as we go forward, we ‒ each in our own way ‒ need to work for the future while cognizant of the past. The future, however, is more important than assigning blame for the past.

Columbus and Jefferson – warts and all ‒ achieved remarkable things. Their sins should not be a cause for a failure to recognize their achievements.

Jefferson deserves the Jefferson Memorial overlooking the Tidal Basin in the nation’s capital and Columbus deserves his day.

October 29, 2021 by: John McWhorter

The Former Secretary of State is Right About the Inutility of White Guilt

Condoleezza Rice, the first Black female secretary of state, who now heads Stanford University’s Hoover Institution — and who, by her account, attended segregated schools in the Deep South — was a guest last week on “The View.” When asked about the critical race theory debate, she said, “One of the worries that I have about the way that we’re talking about race” sometimes these days is that “somehow white people now have to feel guilty for everything that happened in the past.” She added, “I don’t think that’s very productive.” Of course, as she and we know, there’s more to the critical race theory debate than that. But about the strain of educational philosophy that looks to raise students’ awareness of racial injustice, she said that for Black kids to be empowered, “I don’t have to make white kids feel bad for being white.”

Writing for The Grio, the longtime cultural critic Touré offered a piercing reply, calling Rice a “soldier for white supremacy” and saying that white people today, including children, “should cringe at what their ancestors did.” If school curriculums include the harshest aspects of America’s history, he argued, “I really don’t care if learning this makes white kids feel bad — and if it doesn’t, then they are too heartless.”

I can see how someone arrives at that perspective, because white guilt can seem so central to what Black progress needs to be about — emphasis on “seem.” We’re increasingly encouraged to dwell on “white privilege” and “systemic racism” as key impediments, if not the key impediments, to Black progress. But we must ask just what purpose fostering white guilt serves.

Of course, there is a visceral sense of power in fostering white guilt: One has made people realize something and made them see you as deserving of recompense, as harmed and therefore owed. There can be a sense of accomplishment in just demanding that white Americans sit with past wrongs.

But presumably, the goal is to make America “a more perfect union,” as the Constitution has it. And if that’s the goal, our collective efforts to reach it presumably would be about addressing societal conditions rather than these more soul-focused endeavors. One might argue that a realer, not to mention healthier, manifestation of Black affirmation would come from more concrete markers of progress than the dutiful hand-wringing of well-meaning white people about their forebears’ sins.

A compelling reason for fostering white guilt would be that if doing so led white Americans to go out and foster change in society. And sometimes it can — but is white guilt necessary to or the best way to effect societal change?

For the civil rights victories of the 1960s, it wasn’t. We tend to forget how seismic the changes were during that one decade: The Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and the Fair Housing Act of 1968 were undeniably huge advances, even if they did not (and they did not) end racism or completely level the societal playing field. In any case, all of this did not happen because white people became guilty nationwide.

America’s white majority, and with them America’s political leaders, got behind tangible change because segregation as policy, and the violence required to maintain it, was pragmatically inconvenient on the world stage during the Cold War standoff. Technology was the accelerant, in that television illustrated the civil rights movement in a way that radio and newspapers could not.

Certainly, the televised struggle, and the sympathy of a white countercultural movement that rapidly grew in the ’60s, created a sense of guilt among a certain contingent of, especially, younger white Americans questioning the establishment. But these white kids, for all the fascination they elicit in hindsight as preludes to us moderns, were a relatively fringe element at the time. The mid-20th-century American (white) Everyman tended to lack the visceral sense of revulsion at racism that we now take for granted as at least a courtesy norm.

In his classic “An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Modern Democracy,” Gunnar Myrdal observed that “even the white man who defends discrimination frequently describes his motive as ‘prejudice’ and says that it is ‘irrational.’” In other words, the Everyman acknowledged racism but felt no need to disavow it. For example, Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson harbored no special guilt about the challenges faced by Black America but eventually saw it as politically prudent to court the Black electorate.

Thus, in the 1960s, civil rights leaders were able to take advantage of chance configurations. We might take a page from them. The gradual legalization of marijuana could be the start of a general reanalysis of the war on drugs that ravages Black communities. Beyond the current fight over President Biden’s legislative agenda, a new and more targeted demand on infrastructure could and should undergird a focus on training or retraining underserved working-class Black Americans for solid, well-paying vocational jobs. White guilt would be of little relevance amid such on-the-ground developments.

In that light, it bears mentioning that over the decades since the 1960s, when the idea that white Americans need to be guilty settled in among a contingent of Black thinkers, it seems that somehow, no matter what we say or do, white people are never guilty enough and white guilt is supposed to go on in perpetuity. Might it be that the effort to make white people any guiltier than they are is a Sisyphean effort? The dream that white people will, en masse, shed their “fragility” and embrace feeling really, really guilty is about as likely as Schoenberg’s ever being brunch music for more than a rarefied few.

We seek for enlightened white people to acknowledge that they are complicit — to use a term especially popular in recent years — in a system constructed for the benefit of whites. Note that even that word is a strategy to shake white people by the color, in that telling them they are complicit is a fresher way of saying that they should be guilty. Because many white Americans have a way of resisting feeling guilty about things racial that they know are bad but that they themselves didn’t do, using a euphemism such as “complicit” is a way of trying to make the case without eliciting those typical objections: “I’ve never discriminated against anyone”; “I didn’t own slaves.”

But even phrased as complicity, the charge requires not just the occasional acolyte but the white populace as a whole to feel guilty about things people did not individually do, that were often done in the deep past rather than by their parents and that were done within a vast societal system, the operations of which even experts disagree on. That’s a lot. Recall also that most human beings are not, and will never be, dedicatedly history-minded — we live in the present.

What’s more, I don’t completely trust white guilt. It lends itself too easily to virtue signaling, which overlaps only partially, and sometimes not at all, with helping people. I recall a brilliant, accomplished, kind white academic of a certain age who genially told me — after I published my first book on race, “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America,” two decades ago — “John, I get what you mean, but I reserve my right to be guilty.” I got what he meant, too, and did not take it ill. But still, note that word “right.” Feeling guilty lent him something personally fulfilling and signaled that he was one of the good guys without obligating him further. The problem is that one can harbor that feeling while not actually doing anything to bring about change on the ground.

So, I’m with Secretary Rice. Especially because people can actively foster change without harboring (or performing?) a sense of personal guilt for America’s history. Black America likely will not overcome without some white assistance. But I’m not convinced that the way this happens is with white people’s cheeks burning in shame over their complicity. Maybe they can just help.