How Is Christopher Columbus A Hero

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1b) America has celebrated Columbus by making him a symbol of America. America had at one point decided to depict Columbus as a goddess named Colombia. She was used as a symbol of manifest destiny. She was depicted as bringing enlightenment and knowledge to the untamed West and showcases our necessary expansion. We decided to make Columbia a woman because women usually symbolized homelands/motherlands(Matthew Dennis Columbus Day, pg129). It was a natural choice to use Columbus as a symbol of America as he was considered the discoverer of America. Though he likely wasn’t the first person to find America, he was the last to discover it before it was tainted by the old world. He was a necessary figurehead because he found America and wasn’t British, …show more content…
His discovery of America marked the beginning of white America, and it marked the beginning of a long genocide against native Americans. In 1992, there were a bunch of native Americans who poured blood-colored water on the street in protest while protesting and saying “No parades of murderers.”( Matthew Dennis Columbus Day, 157) The blood was probably meant to represent all the native American blood that has spilled since Columbus' discovery of the New World. If you need a good reason to think that Christopher Columbus may not be a hero befitting of America, then you need to look no further than the fact that he kept trying to enslave the native Americans. He kept saying that native Americans, or Indians I guess since he thought he was in India, would make for great workers. While slavery was common at the time, somehow his actions of trying to enslave the native Americans were too far for the Spanish crowns who refused to allow him to, so even people from his time thought that he was going a bit too far, or at least the Spanish monarch did. (Matthew Dennis Columbus Day, 123) 2)Irish immigrants initially faced racial and religious discrimination when they arrived in