The Anti-Woke/Woke Discourse over Columbus Day is Bankrupt, His Heirs Are Not

Columbus is Dead and Does Not Care That We Are Fighting Each Other

Oct 14, 2025

statue of man riding horse under cloudy sky during daytime — Photo by Noel Broda on Unsplash

First I want to commend Aaron Renn1 and Stephen Adubato2 for adding to the conversation on American pluralism with recent Substacks about symbolic recognition and Italian American identity respectively.

It is Columbus Day.

I do not know about you but I miss the pluralism of the late 1990s and early 2000s; multicultural tribal America is a drag. We keep trying to flatten things into either or racial categories and we lost our almost happy ethnic American equilibrium.

Bill Clinton and George W. Bush really fumbled the ball with what America could have been in the 21st century and I blame a lot of the problem on the 2007/2008 financial crisis’ crushing of the economic progress of many previously marginalized Americans. The heightened history wars and the fight over dignity and recognition can be traced to the moment the bottom fell out for too many recently middle class Americans and the coming of age of the first millennials. In its wake, the whole American story was newly litigated, by everyone not just the “Left.” In case you do not remember, 2007 was also when the conversation over immigration flipped to questioning the melting pot and a new open xenophobia. A relatively positive or neutral Columbus Day is causality of the new history culture war.

However, Americans should not fight each other over this day. Instead, we should allow Italian Americans to celebrate their inclusion into the Anglo-American national project, and the rest of the country should either join them or just go about their business. But we should stop pretending that Columbus is that big a deal to the USA or that rejecting Columbus Day has anything to do with empowering Native American tribes.

The Irony of Anti-Wokeness

The terms rightwing and leftwing have become almost meaningless in the USA, so I won’t bore you with litigating that today. But I will ask your indulgence to look at the strange logic of the so-called anti-woke. They define wokeness as an ideological framework that interprets social relations primarily through power, identity, and oppression, seeking to remake culture and institutions around mandated equity rather than individual liberty or objective standards of truth.3

Would that not make Columbus Day the “wokest” holiday in America?

In 1492 Columbus sailed the ocean blue, but that is the beginning, not the end of the tale. After all, Columbus did not found Jamestown or win Independence from Great Britain, yet the day was celebrated and promoted by the federal government because Italians were a discriminated against immigrant minority that was historically dis-empowered by Protestant American society to such an extent many - perhaps half - of the early immigrants returned to Italy.

Spain and the House of Colón

The story of Columbus doesn’t end with his death in 1506. His descendants became some of Spain’s most exalted nobles through a fascinating transformation that reveals just how little Columbus himself has to do with modern American identity politics.

The crucial turning point came in 1508, when Columbus’s eldest son Diego married María Álvarez de Toledo y Rojas, niece of the powerful Duke of Alba and a royal cousin. This marriage catapulted the Colón line from litigious outsiders into the heart of Castilian aristocratic networks. Within a year, Diego was acknowledged as governor of the Indies, restoring the stature his father had lost.

But here’s where it gets interesting: Columbus himself was a headache in his own lifetime. He enslaved Indigenous people and shipped them to Europe. During his conquest of Hispaniola, he spread devastation among the Taíno people. Allegations were made that cruel beatings, dismemberment, and that execution were common punishments under his administration. His sailors engaged in looting, kidnapping, and other violent acts.

The Spanish Crown was so disturbed at the allegations that an official was sent to look into it and in 1500, that man, Francisco de Bobadilla arrested Columbus after discovering he had hanged five Spaniards. Columbus was sent back to Spain in chains, disgraced. While Ferdinand and Isabella eventually released him and acknowledged his skills as a navigator, they never trusted him with administrative power again. Ferdinand did fund his final voyage however.

Columbus died on May 20, 1506, in Valladolid, Spain, feeling a little ill-used and shortchanged, pressing for redress until his final days.

The Great Lawsuit

The most consequential episode shaping Columbus’s posthumous status was a sprawling series of lawsuits known as the pleitos colombinos. The controversy originated in the Capitulations of Santa Fe (1492), which promised Columbus hereditary offices and a tenth of the profits from his discoveries. Queen Isabella agreed to these terms against King Ferdinand’s wishes because Ferdinand believed reaching Asia the way Columbus proposed was impossible. Ironically, Ferdinand was right—Columbus never made it to Asia and continued insisting he had even on his fourth voyage, despite clear Portuguese evidence to the contrary.

Once Spain’s American enterprise began yielding power and wealth, those open-ended grants collided with the monarchy’s determination to centralize authority. Having Columbus’s heirs as hereditary lords of the New World was not going to fly. After Columbus’s death, his son Diego pressed the family’s claims with new urgency. The first major verdict in 1511 favored the Colóns in principle, but satisfied no one. The dispute metastasized into new suits over whether privileges extended to the mainland, and even over how much of the “discovery” could be credited to Columbus alone with the crown digging up testimony from Columbus’s contemporaries to cut his legacy down to size. By the 1520s the suits were still ongoing and a new player wanted it settled: Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor the new King of Spain, the same one locked in a struggle with Luther and the Protestants in Germany.

By 1537, they settled. Columbus’s grandson Luis Colón received the titles Duke of Veragua and Marquess of Jamaica, along with entry among the Grandes de España—Spain’s highest-ranking nobility. The family retained the hereditary title Admiral of the Indies but renounced claims to feudal and viceregal authority. Instead of a huge Colon sub-empire in the West Indies, the Crown gave them two lordships as hereditary fiefs, plus a substantial perpetual annuity compensating for surrendering the open-ended tenth of “all riches.” Charles V got what he wanted and the Colon’s got guaranteed cash: an annuity paid by the Spanish Treasury until 1898. The family prospered for centuries, investing in estates, a palace in Madrid, and the famous “Veragua” fighting-bull ranch. Through advantageous marriages to houses like the Braganzas and Fitz-James Stuarts, they sustained social prestige. Today, the title is held by Cristóbal Colón de Carvajal y Gorosábel, the 18th Duke of Veragua—a titled aristocrat whose wealth is private and whose connection to American politics is exactly zero.

Who Even Wants to Claim Columbus?

Modern genetics has ventured into the Columbus identity question with findings that are tantalizing but contested. While tradition places him as a Genoese son of a wool weaver, alternative theories have long circulated. A Spanish research team has announced results suggesting genetic markers compatible with Sephardic Jewish ancestry and a biogeographical profile pointing to western Mediterranean roots possibly Spanish or, yes, Italian.4

This raises an awkward question: considering his misbehavior in the West Indies, should Jewish people want to claim him?5 Or Italians? The answer seems to be that identity politics makes strange bedfellows, and posthumous claims on problematic historical figures tell us more about present needs than past realities.

America Came From England, and Columbus Didn’t Work For Them

Here is where Americans come into the story. Following the mass lynching of eleven Italian Americans in New Orleans in 1891, President Benjamin Harrison declared the 400th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival a one-time national holiday in 1892 to ease diplomatic tensions with Italy. The Kingdom of Italy had withdrawn its ambassador and severed diplomatic relations with the United States over the lynchings. A Southern lynch mob had created a serious international crisis and this required making amends and placating feelings. In 1937 with FDR was president, Columbus Day officially became an annual federal holiday through presidential proclamation.

Columbus Day exists because of American xenophobia and violence against Italian immigrants—not because Columbus is central to American identity. I actually think we should honor the pain of Italian Americans and remember not to give in to bigotry and xenophobia.

Let’s be clear: Columbus never made it to mainland North America. On his first voyage, he landed in the Bahamas, reached Cuba, and explored Hispaniola. It was a Caribbean story. As an *Italian working for Catholic Spain, Columbus had nothing to do with Tudor England or the later English colonial empire under Protestant Stuart kings who founded Jamestown, Virginia where our America began.

The English had their own explorers. John Cabot (Giovanni Caboto), authorized by Henry VII, made landfall in North America in June 1497—somewhere in southern Labrador, Newfoundland, or Cape Breton Island. His voyages laid the groundwork for later British claims to Canada. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Columbus was not widely celebrated as a hero in England or the American colonies. The English celebrated Sir Francis Drake and Sir Walter Raleigh. Americans celebrated Captain John Smith.

This makes sense when you remember that the Colón family titles were tied to places like Jamaica, which was conquered by English Puritans during Oliver Cromwell’s fiercely anti-Catholic rule and is an English-speaking country today. Spain was a competitor empire, and their heroes were not English or colonial American heroes. Here’s the critical point that modern discourse misses entirely: In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, history was still largely national and not yet flattened into a racialized view of “white” Europeans against “inferior colored” races. The English did not see themselves as part of some pan-European “white” civilization project with the Spanish. The leaders of England saw themselves as a Protestant English kingdom competing against Catholic Spanish people. National and religious identities mattered far more than racial ones. As that changed, European American identity became more confused and contested, not less. You can assimilated many people into national and ethnic histories and cultures, but racialist history flattens and permanently excludes. The English celebrated Sir Francis Drake not as a “white explorer” but as an English hero who defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588 and circumnavigated the globe.

Columbus remained a Spanish hero—and therefore not an English or American one. He became more celebrated after American independence as part of a romantic interpretation of the discovery of the New World, but even then it was relatively low-key. Yes, the American capital is in the “District of Columbia,” but at the time “Colombia” or “Columbia” was simply another name for the Americas—a name derived from Amerigo Vespucci, who sailed for Spain and Portugal and became convinced the lands were a “New World” rather than Asia. German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller’s 1507 world map was the first to use “America” for the New World. Back then you could use America and Colombia interchangeably for the New World. In fact, another thing, while some people complain that the USA is called America, they forget that the República de Colombia is also a country. Some of these fights are really not worth any of our times.

Columbus is Dead and Not Worth Another Culture War

Knowing history is important for living in peace with our neighbors, but Columbus Day should not be another culture war flashpoint. Columbus himself is dead. Nothing we do will affect him. Furthermore, he had no personal contact with the Indigenous peoples of what is now the USA, and dissing him will not repair one broken treaty or build a single hospital or school on a reservation.

Let Italian Americans have their day. It commemorates their painful integration into American society after facing discrimination and violence some of which reappeared during World War Two’s Una Storia Segreta.6 If you are not Italian, enjoy the day off doing things Columbus would not approve of—like evicting him from living rent-free in your mind and not thinking of him at all. But do not ruin the day for your Italian neighbors.

Being one country does not mean we have to share 100% the same heroes or commemorations. We can coexist, and even thrive, without demanding ideological uniformity on every historical figure.

And Jesussaid to him, “Let the dead bury their own dead, but as for you, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.” - The Gospel of Luke 9:60

Outside the Academy w/ Prof. Thompson

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