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Columbus as a Dead White European Male: The Ideological Underpinnings of the Controversy Over 1492
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18852 |
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Section : |
SPECIAL SECTION
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12 / 1991 |
3,795 Words |
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Robert Royal
Robert Royal is a vice president at the Center for Ethics and
Public Policy. |
For most Europeans, as for most North and South Americans, the five hundredth anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the New World next year is reason for gratitude if not outright celebration. Columbus may not have been the first European here, as some would argue, and there is certainly a dark side to him personally and to the Spanish, French, Portuguese, and English legacies in the New World. But Columbus' voyage did two things of indisputable significance: It set the stage for the establishment of the new societies and peoples of the Americas, and it began the transformation of discrete human groups--till then scattered over several continents with little or no contact with one another--into the inhabitants of one world.
In the United States, however, a diverse group of writers, activists, and some religious people who are pursuing an ideological agenda have taken the quincentenary less as an opportunity to reexamine the Genoese navigator than as a pretext for making large-scale denunciations of Western, "Eurocentric" culture. Kirkpatrick Sale, for example, one of the most vigorous and frequently cited critics of the European migration to the New World, has become the central public figure in the revisionist movement. Sale presented the basic case in his 1990 book The Conquest of Paradise: The explorers had behind them a spiritual pathology, "a European that in thought and deed was estranged from its natural environment and had for several thousand years been engaged in depleting and destroying the land and water it depended on, and justifying that with one or another creed or conviction."
Of course, any such simple-minded generalization of a whole continent and civilization invites debunking. But that has not prevented these myths from getting a wide hearing among those with vested interest. Advocacy groups for the environment, Native Americans, and radical feminists have joined with more purely political ideologues in using Columbus as a fruitful target.
Even what might be thought of as mainstream institutions such as the U.S. National Council of Churches (NCC)--an umbrella Protestant Organization whose bureaucracy has for years engaged in advocacy for "progressive" causes--seem to see in the European arrival not a flawed social integration that at least had the merit of bringing the Gospel to new peoples, but as genocide tout court, in fact several interlocking genocides and rapes--of land, of people, of raw materials. In the brief statements the NCC issued earlier this year genocide was mentioned several times per page, while evangelization, at least in a positive sense, not at all. For the NCC, evangelization
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