Douglas: Cancel culture alive and well
Returning to the city of my birth to visit my grandsons in October gave me an opportunity to see the liberal thought police in full force.
On Saturday, October 9, we visited South Philadelphia’s Marconi Plaza to enjoy the Italian American Parade and Festival held annually near the traditional date of October 12 when “he who shall not be named” discovered the New World. Rather than offend Philadelphia’s massive (kidding) indigenous population, Columbus is boxed from view in a plaza honoring Italians in the Italian neighborhood in South Philadelphia.
Yes, I agree Christopher Columbus enslaved the native population his troops subdued, but unfortunately slavery had been part of the world’s experience for thousands of years on all continents.
In fact, the indigenous people in the Americas had practiced slavery well before the explorers arrived. As the World History Encyclopedia notes:
"Men, women, and children taken captive were then enslaved by the victorious tribe, sometimes for life and other times for a given number of years and, in still other cases, until they were adopted and became members of the tribe. People could also be enslaved as hostages, held to ensure compliance with a treaty, and in some tribes, people were not only enslaved for life but any children born to them were also considered slaves, thereby creating a slave class long before the arrival of Europeans."
This may not fit the narrative of those seeking to destroy the Columbus statue, but it is historic reality.
Just as the average Black American sought a day to honor civil rights leader, Martin Luther King, the Italians of Philadelphia sought their day decades before. From Italy most immigrants came from impoverished southern towns and had been kept illiterate to further the work pool for the wealthy farm estates of the nobility. They still wanted to celebrate a native son who had the courage to sail off the edge of a flat earth to prove the opposite.
Those who seek to cancel Columbus fail to recognize the discrimination their Italian American brothers and sisters endured a hundred plus years ago. On March 14, 1891, a mob in New Orleans descended on a local jail and shot and mutilated eleven Italians. The police chief had been shot earlier, and before his death, a witness asked him who did it to him. He was claimed to have whispered back a slur for Italians. New Orleans was home to more Italian immigrants than any other southern city. When nine Italians were charged but not convicted for the late chief’s murder, a massive mob went to the jail and conducted the largest mass lynching in American history.
The effort to fight the racism against Italians evolved into the push for Columbus Day.
I went to a Quaker school in Philadelphia for my high school education where I was taught to embrace different races, nationalities or creeds. Live and let live.
Keeping a statue in a box is a pathetic choice for the city that is the birthplace of freedom and violates William Penn’s goal of brotherly love.
Oh, and if an uncrated Columbus offends you – just don’t go to Marconi Plaza.
Once we start canceling each other for events from hundreds of years ago, have we helped to advance freedom or shrink it?
Chuck Douglas grew up in Philadelphia and is a former New Hampshire judge and Congressman.
This article originally appeared on Portsmouth Herald: Douglas: Cancel culture alive and well
