Brown Insults Hispanics
Published by the Providence Journal on 11-02-09

(The following letter was published in the PROJO on 11-02-09 edited from my letter titled: Leaving Well Enough Alone.)

Regarding Brown University’s renaming Columbus Day: The change is not anti-Italian but anti-Hispanic. Columbus may have been of Italian ethnic descent (or, rather, Genoese), but he sailed for the Spanish kingdom of Ferdinand and Isabel. He accomplished his discoveries within Catholic Spanish culture. Without the Catholic Spanish monarchs sponsoring his voyages, Columbus would be unknown to history.

The Latin peoples of the Americas and their cultures are much more integrated with Columbus than are Italians or Americans. They attribute to Señor Colón the start of their civilization in the New World by calling the holiday in his honor “La Dia de la Raza”: the “Day of the Race,” with all its components, racial or ethnic, cultural and historical. There is no Latin civilization of South America without Sr. Colón.

Did Columbus have mixed motives? Of course. Nature and history are “red in tooth and claw,” as wrote the English poet Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Brown’s decision to rename Columbus Day as Fall Weekend is a monument to its hatred of Hispanics. It indicates a profound ignorance of Latin American culture. Further, the decision demonstrates the worst sort of racism, both against an individual for his ethnic descent and an entire culture. To appease a few Native American students, the Brown faculty assaulted other groups. (Students should study the practices of warfare of the Native American tribes. They tortured their captives.)

The attempt to revise history piecemeal will generate endless conflict. And renaming the Columbus Day holiday demonstrates that when we condemn one individual or culture, we condemn ourselves.

T.R. Catanzarite
Riverside