White House Proclamations for Columbus Day and 'Indigenous Peoples' Day' Contain Very Telling Differences
The pervasiveness of woke ideology in the minds of affluent liberals runs deeper than many Americans know.
Until you have lived and worked among them, or at least until you have immersed yourself in their writings, you can have no idea how ingrained and thus reflexive those liberals’ group identity-based assertions really are.
On Friday, President Joe Biden illustrated this reflexive woke ideology through twin proclamations of “Columbus Day” and “Indigenous Peoples’ Day.”
For good and ill, Genoese explorer Christopher Columbus’s 1492 voyage to the New World helped change the course of history.
When it comes to European colonization of the Western Hemisphere, however, woke liberals tend to see primarily ill.
According to the dichotomous modern woke narrative, adapted from Marxism, human beings act either as oppressors or as victims. In this narrative, individual behavior counts for nothing. Skin color and other physical markers determine one’s identity as oppressor or victim.
Thus, in the woke narrative, what matters about Columbus is not his courage or his devotion to the Catholic faith but rather his identity as a European who, purely by virtue of that identity, bears responsibility for every evil that his fellow Europeans for centuries thereafter imposed upon the New World.
For instance, Biden’s proclamation celebrated not Columbus’s achievement but rather the generations of Italian Americans who followed him. The president, in fact, made little mention of the explorer himself.
Likewise, even the generic celebration of Italian Americans came with its own woke caveat.
“For many Italian Americans, the lives of their ancestors in this country were not always easy. In addition to the challenges of starting life in a new land, they also faced discrimination,” the proclamation read.
Of course they did. Otherwise, how could woke liberals treat them as worthy of acknowledgement? Only as victims — as historical caricatures upon whom affluent modern liberals may bestow their retroactive beneficence — do Italian Americans matter.
“In the face of hate, Italian Americans persisted — advancing our Nation and challenging us to live up to our highest values,” the nauseating proclamation continued.
Meanwhile, Biden’s proclamation of “Indigenous Peoples’ Day,” which does not exist as a national holiday, read as equally condescending.
“On Indigenous Peoples’ Day, we honor Indigenous peoples’ strength, courage, and resilience. We celebrate the vast contributions of Indigenous communities to the world,” the proclamation began.
Then came a paragraph on the “cruelty, violence, and intimidation” that the people of those indigenous communities faced.
The problem, of course, is not that the two proclamations are entirely false.
After all, many Italian immigrants to the United States undoubtedly did experience challenges and hostility.
Moreover, the proclamation’s summary of Indian history does include broad truths. Indeed, all modern Americans should study the Era of Indian Removal and its crowning horror, the Trail of Tears.
Objections should arise, however, when those broad truths produce reflexive generalizations that serve a woke-Marxist narrative.
To illustrate, consider the following passage from the 2001 book “American Colonies,” by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Alan Taylor:
“In fact, the labor of Indian women, although certainly considerable, was less time-consuming and exhausting than the chores of colonial women, who tended larger and more complex houses. Indian women also took pleasure in their practice of working in the fields cooperatively in festive groups.”
As a synthesis of Colonial-Era scholarship, “American Colonies” has many outstanding qualities. And Taylor is a very accomplished historian.
When I read that passage more than two decades ago, however, I found it uniquely repellent. After all, I thought, how could Taylor possibly know what Indian women felt about agricultural labor? Why would he write such confident-sounding nonsense? And how did it get past his editors?
Years later, I came to realize that the notion of Indian women working in festive groups, contrasted with the drudgery experienced by their European colonial counterparts, constituted one of those ingrained ideas that produced the reflexive assertions modern liberals invariably make when they project their oppressor-victim dichotomy onto the distant past.
Of course Indian women loved agricultural work. To suggest otherwise might imply that European Christians introduced a concept of domesticity that had intrinsic value. And in this context we know that European Christians, including women, had to have acted as oppressors.
In a hypothetical chapter on gender, however — Taylor mercifully did not include one — those same European Christian colonial women would have assumed the role of victims, for the author, employing his reflexive assertions in the service of the oppressor-victim narrative, undoubtedly would have cast European Christian colonial men as the oppressors, as he did elsewhere in the book.
Taylor almost certainly did not give a second thought to his assertions about Indian and colonial women. Nor did his editors. After all, those assertions fit the reflexive oppressor-victim narrative.
In like manner, Biden almost certainly gave his assertions no thought. He could not celebrate Columbus as a history-making explorer. But he could celebrate Italian Americans as victims of “discrimination.” Needless to say, the same goes for Indians, whom liberals prefer to remember not as great warriors, nor as skilled diplomats who formed strategic alliances with colonial powers, but as victims.
One hopes, of course, that someday nuance will creep back into our collective understanding of the American past.
Until then, we must set the record straight each time Biden or one of his fellow affluent liberals mindlessly advances a toxic woke-Marxist view of history and the world.
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