Erasing history by Advance Media NY Editorial Board
Advance Media New York's Editorial Board offers our institutional opinion on matters of community interest. Editorials are separate from news. Editorial board members: Tim Kennedy, president; Trish LaMonte, VP/Content; Katrina Tulloch, Videographer/Photographer; Marie Morelli, editorial/opinion leader. Send email to mmorelli@syracuse.com.
Choose healing over division. Remove Syracuse’s Columbus statue
(Editorial Board Opinion)
By Advance Media NY Editorial Board
The people and ideas a community celebrates in its public spaces reflect our values, our aspirations and our times. Our times demand an honest reappraisal of the statue of Christopher Columbus in one of Syracuse’s most prominent public squares — one that leads us to support Mayor Ben Walsh’s intention to replace it with a symbol that will unify the community instead of dividing it.
The Columbus statue was raised in 1934 by Syracuse’s Italian American residents as a monument to their culture and civic belonging. At the time, popular history’s view of Columbus was of a heroic explorer who “discovered” the New World and brought Christianity to the Western Hemisphere.
Since then, our understanding of Columbus has expanded and evolved to include the perspectives of the people on the receiving end of his conquest: the Indigenous peoples who were here for millennia, and who were nearly wiped out in the centuries of colonization that followed. They are represented on the statue literally under the feet of Columbus and on their knees in subservience.
Today’s supporters of keeping the statue wish to recast Columbus as a monument to their ancestors’ perseverance in the face of discrimination against immigrants in this city. That selective view of history is blind to the pain of the Onondaga Nation people on whose ancestral land it sits. To them, Columbus is a symbol of genocide, oppression, subjugation, theft and cultural erasure.
In spite of everything, the Onondaga are still here. They want the statue to go — and have for decades. Finally, they have been heard.
Walsh convened a community dialogue on the monument’s future in 2018. It produced diametrically opposed interpretations of history and a menu of options for the future of Columbus Circle. Calls for the mayor to act grew louder in the summer of 2020, as the nation reckoned with its racist past after the murder of George Floyd. Walsh decided to remove the monument and remake the circle into a Heritage Park that celebrates the multicultural fabric of today’s Syracuse, including Italian Americans.
We believe the mayor is within his rights to do so. The city owns the monument and can do with it what it pleases. It renamed the circle once and can do so again. More importantly, just as the city’s leaders in 1934 chose to honor Columbus, its leaders today can choose a different person or symbol to honor.
Editorial boards can change their minds, too. Our predecessors in 1934 hailed the monument as “a treasured and permanent memorial of Columbus’ greatness and glory” — an opinion we do not hold in 2021.
The statue’s supporters are suing to prevent its removal. We regret they did not take the path of the Italian American community in Buffalo, which voluntarily took down its statue of Columbus in recognition of its divisiveness “and to provide a positive example of peaceful change.” That it has become an issue in the Syracuse mayoral campaign trivializes the more pressing issues facing the city: violence, poverty and economic inequality.
Removing statues or changing the names of public places often raises the charge that we are “erasing” history. Monuments are not history; they are an interpretation of history at a moment in time. History’s view of Columbus has become fuller,
moar
https://www.syracuse.com/opinion/2021/10/choose-healing-over-division-remove-syracuses-columbus-statue-editorial-board-opinion.html
https://archive.is/wip/b7T7j