Notable Moments in White People Taking Credit For Discovering Things (Columbusing)
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For some of you, today is Columbus Day. For others it is Indigenous Peoples day and for the rest of you, it’s Monday.
Christopher Columbus was an Italian sailor who wandered around the Caribbean and the Americas capturing and raping indigenous peoples. For his troubles, he is said to have “discovered” what we now know as the United States, an attribution that—just as he did—leaves out the worth of the millions of people who had been living here for a very, very long time.
Objectively, fuck Christopher Columbus.
However, one of the few helpful things he did was inadvertently give us a word for the phenomenon when someone (specifically a white someone) takes or is given credit for discovering something that existed long before it came to that individual’s attention.
Columbusing lives in the vast neighborhood of cultural appropriation, but contains the specific insult of acting like the (white) person in question has come across a cool new thing—all while erasing that thing’s true origins and probably, definitely, not properly compensating the originators.
So on this non-holiday, let’s look back at what Christopher Columbus really inspired. This, as well as the genocide of millions of indigenous people, is his legacy.
“We built this country.”*
*Uttered most often and notably by old angry white people usually while they’re protesting something progressive and inevitable.
In the most literal sense, I would argue that America was allowed to be built by Native Americans who magnanimously did not murder the random pilgrim people who rolled up to their shores, but instead gave them farming advice.
That was followed by two hundred years of free African slave labor that laid the economic foundation for America and built some neat buildings like the U.S. Capitol.
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