Got the full "culture wars" experience yesterday at the South Philly Columbus Day parade and Italian American festival. Arrived just in time to hear a man telling a little girl, "I don't want to hear that 'Indigenous People's Day' crap -- they come across the border..." at which point I had walked out of earshot, marveling that Italian-American heritage celebrations can now be anti-immigration. But we are indeed there, especially in South Philly, where the city has put a plywood box around a Columbus statue that is a traditional gathering spot for the Italian community.
I fully recognize the importance of shifting our national discourse away from celebrating people who perpetrated genocide and slavery -- but the world is not a simple place, and I also recognize how that battle has been used to turn Italian working class folks who always voted Democratic into fervent Republicans and Trump supporters -- and also that the working class Italian Democrat voting bloc was the foundation for Frank Rizzo, who ran one of the most famously racist administrations outside the South.
Like I say, the world is not a simple place -- but we need to find ways to build coalitions with people who profoundly disagree with us about some important issues to deal with other important issues. The logic of rich folks' "divide and conquer" is not that the divisions among working folks are new; it is using longstanding divisions to make working people attack each other and ignore (or support) the people who are meanwhile robbing and impoverishing them.
I'm not going to pretend I know how to get past those divisions and build those coalitions -- but if I had to choose between winning a symbolic victory and getting universal health care, or child care, or a voting rights act, or a decent minimum wage, or cutting fossil fuels, or getting guns off the streets, or getting rent control, or good schools, or serious oversight of police... I would be willing to take the plywood off the Columbus statue in Marconi Park for another few years, until the current threat has passed.
Totally agree!
ReplyDeleteFor the most part I agree, but as a retired teacher, I would argue we need to tell the truth about our history or it will repeat itself. Keep the statue but put a disclaimer on it - Columbus didn't "discover" America (millions of people were already here) and he, and the other Europeans who followed him, decimated the indigenous population, took their land, and tried to wipe out their culture.
ReplyDeleteJust as we need to confront the current attack on the teaching about racism, so to do we need to be clear about our history.