Thinking for the Future

In the media, the start of the school year often means more than pumpkin-spice recipes and recommendations. It often means it's time to repeat concerns that today's college students are either too soft or too confrontational, for tolerant, high-minded debate that is supposed to be the admission-right of higher education.

This week, I have a different perspective on two editorials promoting Columbus Day against the kind of empty "identity politics" purported to be the only thing the left on campus cares about.

One appeared in the Wall Street Journal, remolding Silicon Valley as a colonial venture and touting Columbus as a bold, curious disruptor who didn't succumb to the haters. While imagining the inventor of modern imperialism as a intellectual progenitor of neoliberal plunder is a plausible, if unintended, reading of this white backwash, it's just absurd to believe and its desperation for modern esteem and relevance is obvious.

The other is from the Times (of course), and it's only slightly more serious. It points out, correctly, that like Confederate monuments, venerating Columbus isn't something that dates from anywhere near his own time. It comes rather from the turn of the 20th century, when Italian Americans, and immigrants in general, were widely vilified as others in this country and sought a symbolic connection to the story of white settlement used to exclude them. That the xenophobia felt against Italian people is now felt about others speaks to the success of this strategy.

But neither speaks to any serious reason anyone has questioned the uncritical celebration of America as exploration. 

When my Introduction to Islam class talked about the complications of religious identity, and I brought up Columbus Day, nobody fell for an argument like any present in the Times or Journal. It was the shortest Socratic exercise we've had. I even threw in the claim you don't hear much of anymore that disrespect to the explorer is also disrespect to believing Christians in the Americas, who see Columbus as Columba, a bringer of the faith.

The problem with any of the apologetics, is none of them responds to a first-person account of what Columbus actually did. None of them seriously registers the plain historical fact that violence, slavery, and dispossession were the defining features of Columbus' exploratory mission as so many after. 

Justifications need to refer to representation or something even more abstract like intellectual adventurousness. That both of these are defining values invoked by modern universities is no accident. Many people, at least the people who write in centrist news media, learn to argue in college. They learn, or ought to learn, that an argument is only an argument when it proceeds from shared understandings, when both sides are arguing about something. When one side is only arguable ignoring the other's positions it can't refute, not much is going on intellectually.

I'm not claiming the students or scholars I work with completely comprehend indigenous perspectives or have come to terms with colonialism over the long term, far from it. But at least in this instance, the young people whose ability to stand up and confront ugly realities we worry so much over seems to be growing and thriving.