![]() Hirsch, and Arthur Schlesinger have argued for an emphasis on Western civilization. Multiculturalism is better understood as a civil conflict within the Western academy over contrasting approaches to learning about the world.Ĭritics of multiculturalism such as Allan Bloom, E. Who can possibly be against hundreds of thousands of American students studying the Analects of Confucius or the philosophical writings of Alfarabi and Avicenna? The debate about multiculturalism is not over whether to study other cultures but how to study the West and other cultures. ![]() Yet if multiculturalism represented nothing more than an upsurge of interest in other cultures, it would be uncontroversial. Historian Peter Stearns insists that the multicultural debate “is between those who think there are special marvelous features about the Western tradition that students should be exposed to, and others who feel it’s much more important for students to have a sense of the way the larger world has developed.” This is the unmistakable appeal of multiculturalism: it is obviously better to study many cultures rather than a single culture, to have diverse points of view rather than a single one. Yet despite what was known half a millennium ago, there are some in our today who wish to whitewash Columbus as a brave, masterful navigator who spread “European Civility” (*cough*cough* whiteness *cough*cough*) to the continent of savages.Multiculturalism is presented by its advocates in the schools and universities as a benign alternative to monoculturalism. His description pulls no punches: it drips with condemnation of Columbus’s crimes. Las Casas’s writing is not one devoid of morals. The admiral (Columbus), it is true, was blind as those who came after him, and he was so anxious to please the King that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians… ” “Our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle, and destroy small wonder, then, if they (natives) tried to kill one of us now and then. Writing a decade after Columbus’s conquest, las Casas compiled a history of Columbus’s crimes in History of the Indies, which included transcriptions of Columbus’s personal accounts and journals. The most trusted source of the early colonial period is a priest turned anti-slavery advocate named Bartolome de las Casas. Historical witnesses support the Crown’s actions. “Judging by the standards of his time,” because fire didn’t hurt until the 1980s. He deserves unequivocal scorn, the kind history reserves for its most diabolical participants. According to the morals and judgment of his own society, Christopher Columbus was a mass-murdering, genocidal manic. Not only is this platitude an egregious dehumanization of Columbus’s victims, but it is ahistorical. There are many methods used to whitewash our past (“slavery was a long time ago,” etc., etc.), but the one I find most infuriating is the vapid defense of “judging people by the standards of their time.” This excuse appears annually this time of year, as it’s the go-to shield for Christopher Columbus, the mass murderer whom we are soon to celebrate. Instead of acknowledging and apologizing for the past crimes of genocide, slavery, and segregation, we’ve chosen to minimize and ignore them, instead electing to view the colonization of North America through rose-colored glasses (which helps obscure the blood). Saying Columbus “discovered” America is like saying Hitler “discovered” Poland.Īmerica has never truly reconciled with our history. ![]()
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