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Mayor Ben Walsh’s decision this month to remove the Christopher Columbus statue in downtown Syracuse and rename the city’s Columbus Circle reinforces a disturbing trend in our nation’s towns and cities. Social-justice activists are chanting their black and white dogma, and our public servants are ceding more and more cultural territory to them as appeasement.

Columbus, despite his numerous flaws and errors, accomplished many momentous feats in his lifetime. Nevertheless, we must now ignore them all because activists say so.

Dozens of countries around the world have erected monuments and memorials to Columbus because, to many, the Genoese explorer and his voyages represent a crucial turning point in history. He miraculously navigated what his contemporaries thought to be an impossible journey across the Atlantic Ocean, and he formed the first permanent ties between Europe and the Americas. The merit of his achievements ranks Columbus as one of the most significant and tenacious sailors of all time.

On one hand, Columbus serves as a timeless symbol of progress, exploration and new horizons. But on the other, the loss of Indigenous life, knowledge and culture that followed will forever be one of history’s greatest tragedies. But laying the full blame at the feet of Columbus obfuscates the truth and potentially lets other, more blameworthy men off the hook.

Too often in conversations of memorialization and iconography, progressives insist on holding historical figures up against our modern values. Given enough time, everybody will fail that test.

Those looking to totally delegitimize Columbus’s accomplishments tally up every Indigenous death in the decades and centuries following his arrival in the Americas to levy tenuous, misleading claims that Columbus committed genocide against all Indigenous peoples.

While Columbus and his men perpetrated barbaric acts of violence against groups of Indigenous peoples in the Caribbean, blood-thirsty conquistadores and frontiersmen, many of whom launched their crusades well after Columbus’s death in 1506, committed the lion’s share of massacres against Indigenous peoples.

Moreover, few critics of Columbus ever acknowledge that the involuntary spread of disease, not violence or policy, is responsible for the vast majority of deaths of Indigenous peoples.

Columbus did not possess the knowledge of epidemiology that we have now. When he set off westward into uncharted waters, he simply didn’t know that up to 95% of Indigenous peoples would perish from Eurasian infections.

Can we then, in good conscience, condemn Columbus as one of history’s most notorious, genocidal brutes for failing to predict and prevent biological and epidemiological forces beyond his control?

Ultimately, what this controversy boils down to is the refusal to reconcile a complex history with modern day narratives and values. Today, a beloved statue of Columbus just so happens to be the latest target of social justice activists’ outrage.

“(Where) is the line between statues that are ok, and those that are not?” said Grant Reeher, SU professor and director of the Campbell Public Affairs Institute. “Why aren’t we having a conversation, say, about renaming our nation’s capital something other than Washington, given that Washington was a slave owner?”

Those cheering Walsh’s decision fail to understand that statues and dedications are not made to glorify the mistakes, errors or evil actions of historical figures. Generally, they represent the positive, and the folly of progressives calling for the removal of these statues also understand that complex humans can and should deserve memorialization, too.

“Historically speaking, statue destroyers have a bad reputation with subsequent generations,” said Stephen Webb, an SU history professor. “The destruction of Catholic religious images by the Puritans, then seen as a moral imperative, now seen as vandalism. The removal of the Columbus statue smacks of the same sort of iconoclasm: religious prejudice and cultural contempt.”

Whether it was “cultural contempt,” pressure from activists who harbor it or poor judgement that ultimately led Walsh to make such an erroneous determination, one thing’s certain: the urban landscape of downtown Syracuse will never be the same.

Cesar Gray is a senior political science and government major. His column appears bi-weekly. He can be reached at cfgray@syr.edu.

Published on October 20, 2020 at 11:28 pm