Nine cities have left behind the national holiday of Columbus Day this year in favor of an Indigenous People’s Day. Albuquerque, NM, Lawrence, KS, Portland, OR, Minneapolis, MN, Oklahoma City, OK, and Olympia, WA all passed legislation this year to supersede the outdated and offensive holiday. Erie County, NY also moved in favor of an Indigenous People's day after the state of South Dakota eliminated Columbus Day in 1990, Berkeley, CA made the shift in 1992, and Seattle, WA began celebrating Indigenous People’s Day in 2014 (commence round of applause).

Considering the facts above, I was contemplating not writing an article on the arbitrary and insulting nature of Columbus Day because I thought it was not necessary. Why continue to push an issue covered thoroughly by historians like Howard Zinn and Eduardo Galeano as well as online sources like Gawker, The Oatmeal, and The Daily Dot. But then I realized I was probably being too optimistic because the Huffington Post still posts hogwash like this:

“There are many American holidays sprinkled throughout the year, but Columbus Day is among the most important. Without Christopher Columbus, there would be no America as we know it today.”

So, clearly, I need to spell out exactly why Christopher Columbus is not a man worth celebrating.

Columbus Did NOT Discover America

The first human beings to "discover" America were nomadic tribes who crossed over the Bering Strait, a land bridge once present between Asia and present-day Alaska only a mere 15,000 years ago. You may be thinking, “yes, but Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in the sense that the European world, at the time, only recognized the existence of Europe, Asia, and Africa.” But even when being Eurocentric about it and discounting the history of native peoples (which is that not what Columbus Day is truly representative of), white people had "discovered" America hundreds of years prior to the great Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus.

In fact, a whopping 500 years before Columbus landed in the Americas, Viking explorer Leif Eriksson made landfall at present-day northeastern Canada when he was blown off course in a massive storm while sailing from Norway to Greenland. Norwegian archeologists in the 1960s proved Eriksson’s landfall when they unearthed the remains of a small settlement built by Eriksson’s crew.

Columbus Did NOT Prove The World Was Round

In 1492 when Columbus sailed the ocean blue, very few people actually thought it was possible to fall off the edge of the Earth. So, if he did set sails to prove the Earth was round someone clearly did not give him the memo. In fact, he would have been about 2,000 years too late because, by the third century B.C.E., Eratosthenes determined the Earth's shape and circumference using basic geometry and sundials.

Columbus WAS Genuinely A Terrible Man

Just pushing aside the fact that Columbus misconstrued the native peoples who saved his life after crashing the Santa Maria into cannibals, Christopher Columbus (and his crew) raped and pillaged, sold into sex slavery, and hunted for sport the native peoples of the New World. Eventually massacring over 250,000 native men, women and children in his time, Columbus sparked one of the longest and most deadly genocides in history. An estimated 10 to 15 million indigenous people lived in the United States, by 1880 there were roughly 300,000.

And even so, Columbus Day only became a federal holiday in 1937. Franklin D. Roosevelt proclaimed Columbus day a national holiday following the intense lobbying of the Knights of Columbus. The organization was seeking to promote the Italian explorer due to the fervent racism and violence shown towards Italian following a wave of immigration in the 1800s.

To clarify, I know the majority of Americans do not "celebrate" Columbus Day in the traditional way most holidays are celebrated, but it is a Federal Reserve Bank holiday and shows up pre-printed on calendars. A day of appreciation for Christopher Columbus is a day of appreciation for a longstanding history of racism, violence, murder, and disrespect. The last thing a United States with race relation issues needs is the celebration of a white supremacist. Only twenty-three states and Washington DC currently recognize Columbus Day as a paid holiday, but that is still too many.