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It’s time to end Columbus Day: An Open Letter to the City of Philadelphia

11Oct

By Samantha Pinto6 Comments

Opinion

It’s time to end Columbus Day: An Open Letter to the City of Philadelphia

For too long we have honored colonizers and slave masters and silenced the history of Indigenous and enslaved peoples. It’s time for Philadelphia and the world to stop celebrating the architects of genocide and white supremacy. It’s time to end Columbus Day. Contro Colombo: Italian Americans for Indigenous People’s Day We are a growing group of Philadelphian Italian-Americans petitioning the City of Philadelphia to officially replace Columbus Day with Indigenous People’s Day. We stand in solidarity with groups like Indigenous 215 and Indigenous Peoples Day Philly who have been making this demand for years. For too long, members of the Italian-American community have stood behind Columbus and lifted him up as our hero, but any student of history can plainly see he was not. T...

Philly Italian Americans Sign Open Letter for Racial Justice

by Samantha Pinto and Jeanne D’Angelo, in collaboration with the forthcoming Philly Radical Italian Network July 22, 2020 For too long, mainstream Italian-American organizations have claimed to speak for everyone in our community, framing critiques of figures like Columbus as attacks on all Italian-Americans. These organizations ignore those who work in solidarity with Black liberation and Indigenous self-determination movements as well as the racial and ideological diversity of the people who make up the Italian diaspora. Many of us support the removal of all public monuments devoted to symbols of white supremacy and violence, like Christopher Columbus and Frank Rizzo. These conversations have been reignited by the recent protests in Philadelphia in response to the mur...

Why Italian Americans Should Support Black Lives Matter

by Ross Caputi To the dismay of many Italian-Americans, statues of Christopher Columbus have become a target of the abolitionist wrath elicited by the murders of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. Though once seen as permanent fixtures of our cultural landscape, the month of June has cast a precarious future on many of the most well-known statues in our communities. All symbols of historic and contemporary racism have suddenly become candidates to be torn down. The fallen Christopher Columbus statue outside the Minnesota State Capitol after a group led by American Indian Movement members tore it down in St. Paul, Minnesota, on June 10, 2020. The reaction from the Italian-American community has been mixed, with some interpreting the vandalism of Columbus statues as an attack on Ita...