Cancel Columbus!
Patient Zero of the White Supremacist Plague
by
Timothy McGettigan, PhD
Professor of Sociology
Colorado State University-Pueblo
and
Earl Smith, PhD
Professor of Sociology
University of Delaware
Abstract
White supremacy begins and ends with Columbus. Cancel Columbus. Cancel white supremacy.
Introduction - The Worst Plague in History
The most devastating plague ever to strike humanity was not a virus. COVID 19 is awful,
the Spanish Flu was horrific, the Bubonic Plague was hideous, but white supremacist racism
has been the most devastating contagion ever to ravage humanity. What other contagion
has maliciously invaded, terrorized, and annihilated the indigenous inhabitants of entire
continents for the past 500+ years?
Many people believe that racism has always existed in its current form. But that's not true.
Racism is a form of sadism (Meloy, 1997) that ebbs and flows in response to capricious
social policy shifts. Quite simply, racist social policies create racist societies. By the same
token, anti-racist policies create anti-racist societies (McGettigan and Smith, 2016). It's a
two-way street, so never lose hope. But it is certainly an uphill trudge.
White supremacist racism emanated from a specific set of historical events. Before
Christopher Columbus journeyed to the western hemisphere, there was no such thing as
white supremacist racism (Mann 2005, 2011). To this day, white supremacists insist that
they are innately superior to those they despise (Horne, 2018; Kusz, 2017; Wade, 2014).
However, there is no scientific evidence to support those claims, and no one clung to such
erroneous beliefs prior to 1492 (Malott, 2011). It was not until Columbus blundered into
the New World (Bigelow, 1998) that greedy Europeans invented white supremacist racism
as part of a diabolical scheme to secure uncontested ownership of the Western Hemisphere.
For the Love of God?!?
When Pope Alexander IV got wind of Columbus’ experiences in the New World, he sensed
an opportunity. Though one might expect the leader of a benevolent religion to embrace
the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere as sisters and brothers, Pope Alexander
IV had other ideas.
Instead of reaching out in fellowship, Pope Alexander IV decided to rob the Western
Hemisphere’s inhabitants of their lives, their way of life, their dignity, and most importantly,
their homeland.
Many people have wondered why Europeans were able to colonize so many new territories
during Europe’s *glorious* Age of Discovery (Todorov, 1984). Because the winners typically
write history (Zinn, 2010), apologists have often claimed that Europeans acquired colonies
all over the world due to their innate superiority (Wade, 2014). But, far from an exhibition
of intrinsic superiority, it was Europeans’ insatiable hunger for booty and ultra-violence that
powered their campaigns of colonial domination. If you doubt my word, check out the
marching orders that Pope Nicholas V issued to outbound European explorers/pirates:
...invade, search out, capture, vanquish, and subdue all Saracens and pagans whatsoever,
and other enemies of Christ wheresoever placed, and the kingdoms, dukedoms, principalities,
dominions, possessions, and all movable and immovable goods whatsoever held and possessed
by them and to reduce their persons to perpetual slavery(!!!), and to apply and appropriate
to himself and his successors the kingdoms, dukedoms, counties, principalities, dominions,
possessions, and goods, and to convert them to his and their use and profit (Romanus
In sum, kill (or enslave) everyone you meet and steal their stuff. Apparently, human decency
isn’t a job requirement for the papacy.
Like good little Christian soldiers, European explorers took their papal marching orders to
heart and conducted the most gruesome genocide campaigns that the world has ever seen.
That's not a type of superiority to be proud of.
In spite of white supremacist claims to the contrary, biologically speaking all humans are
equal (Sussman, 2014). Not identical, but equal (McGettigan and Smith, 2016). Racists
attach enormous significance to minor cosmetic differences (e.g., skin tone, hair texture,
ear, eye, and nose shape) not because of their biological significance, but because of their
triviality (Spelsberg, 2011). Counterintuitively, racism tends to be vitriolic because of how
difficult it is to maintain categorical distinctions in a species that exhibits so much
uniformity (Montagu, 1964). The human penchant for ethno-blending--the technical term
for which is “reticulation” (Sapp, 2012)--makes a mockery of racist struggles to fabricate
ethnic purity (Hitler, 2000).
The biological facts are in: There is one human race and all humans are full-fledged members
of it.
Severe social inequalities emerge as a consequence of unfair social policies rather than
innate superiority or inferiority (McGettigan and Smith, 2016). When they learned of its
existence, greedy Europeans decided to use any means necessary to acquire uncontested
ownership of the New World (Jaimes, 1992). Columbus (1991) himself reported that, like
all major landmasses as of 1492, the New World was densely-populated with indigenous
inhabitants. So, in order for greedy Europeans to claim the New World for themselves,
they would have to concoct social policies which granted themselves permission to coldly,
callously obliterate the Western Hemisphere’s countless inhabitants (Deloria, 1995).
What kind of sickos do stuff like that?
WTF!! No One Could Do Anything So Horrible…Could They?
Here we must pause to consider the staggering ruthlessness involved in meticulously
extirpating the inhabitants of an entire hemisphere (Smith, 2015). Everyone knows that
theft and murder are crimes. We all learned that in Kindergarten, right? We also know
that people who commit crimes in the service of greed are bad eggs: they are criminals
with a capital C. Furthermore, robbing and murdering a fellow human being is downright
unconscionable. Now, try to imagine how much more awful is it to coldly, calculatingly rob,
rape, and murder the inhabitants of an entire hemisphere into oblivion? Even worse, the
perpetrators of New World genocide crafted a narrative that made them out to be heroes
rather than villains for their monstrous misdeeds (Wolfe, 2006).
What kind of sickos do stuff like that?
There are no words to describe horrors of such magnitude. Nevertheless, that is precisely
what Pope Alexander IV and his cronies set out to accomplish (i.e., unrestricted and
unrepentant genocide) via the Doctrine of Discovery.
So, how did Christopher Columbus come to be known as the discoverer of the New World
(Zinn, 2010)? The Doctrine of Discovery stated that non-Christians were non-people. Bald-
faced lie though it was, Pope Alexander IV insisted that Columbus was the first “Real Man”
to set foot in the New World. In so doing, Pope Al IV also invented the fiction of white
male supremacy (i.e., white men matter, but Others don’t).
PAUSE: Nah! That can't be right! Just because a greedy, cold-hearted Pope claimed that
non-Christians should be raped, robbed and murdered out of existence doesn’t mean that
his devoted Christian followers would ever carry out such depravity...
...would they?!?
As far as greedy Europeans were concerned, if Pope Alexander IV stated that the Western
Hemisphere was Terra Nullius they needed no further convincing (Newcomb, 2008). The
countless millions of poor, innocent souls who died in the meat-grinder of Manifest Destiny
were, as far as Pope Alexander IV was concerned, naught but worthless heaps of collateral
damage. What are human lives worth if they obstruct the path of a power-mongering Pope?
Bizarre as it may seem, this is literally the way that Columbus became anointed as the
Discoverer (in European minds) of the New World (Craven, 1942). Pope Alexander IV said
that Columbus was the first Real Man to set foot in the New World and that stone-cold lie
has conveniently defined reality for greedy Europeans ever since (Wolfe, 2006). Heck, if a
lie lines one's pockets, why argue?
While greedy Europeans profited enormously, the human cost of the Doctrine of
Discovery is almost too ghastly to countenance. Pope Alexander IV created a false,
but highly-consequential dichotomy between Christians and non-Christians. Though
that distinction involved naught but a simple cultural preference (NEWSFLASH: One
can either choose to be Christian or not, right?), Pope Alexander IV treated
Euro-Christianity as the sole criteria to determine an individual’s “worthiness” to
exist: Euro-Christians were exalted as Real Men, while non-Christians were reviled
as disposable sub-humans (Steuter and Wills, 2010). That false dichotomy also
provided a rationale for the white supremacist racism that plagues humanity to this
very day (Lehman, 2016): Greedy white men count. Others don’t.
Having been told that indigenous peoples were worthless subhumans, white supremacist
racists (including luminaries such as George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abe Lincoln,
Teddy Roosevelt, etc.) systematically carried out the hemispheric genocide that was
required to bring about Pope Alexander's fabled Manifest Destiny (Freehling, 1972;
Guyatt, 2016).
As long as white supremacists cling to the transparent lie that indigenous peoples are
worthless subhumans there need be no moral reckoning for the unspeakable horrors upon
which The World’s Greatest Democracy has been built (Frederickson, 2015). That is why
the Heirs of Columbus remain doggedly determined to preserve the pathetic lie that
Columbus discovered America (Bigelow, 1998). The truth behind that lie is too horrible
for gentlefolk to ponder (Foner, 2016). The Heirs of Columbus have managed to keep
their dirty little secret under wraps for 500+ years, but, at long last the ugly truth is
finally being revealed.
"But why?" The Sons of Italy plead, "Why can't we perpetuate the insulting lie that
Christopher Columbus was a great American hero?"’
Because he was anything but.
Revealing the Ugly Truth
As with COVID 19, we can’t remedy an illness by pretending it doesn’t exist. If a white
supremacist contagion lurks among us, it will continue inflicting grievous harm until we
confront and cure it (Alexander, 2012; McGettigan and Smith, 2016; Obama, 2008).
That’s why every last Christopher Columbus statue needs to kiss the sidewalk ASAP.
Democracy won’t exist until we put an end to the lie that Columbus should be credited
for discovering an uninhabited New World. So long as we continue blinding ourselves with
the Columbus Myth, we’ll continue pretending that he and his heirs did not villainously
murder the rightful inhabitants of an entire hemisphere; all told, Manifest Destiny
qualifies as the most abominable crime in human history.
Columbus was not a hero. The sooner we embrace that all-important truth, the sooner we
will be able to wipe out the enduring contagion of white supremacist murder and mayhem
that Columbus-worship both promotes and conceals (McGettigan and Smith, 2016).
We can't change what Columbus and Pope Alexander IV did 500+ years ago. But we can
do everything in our power to prevent white supremacists from inflicting more injustice,
violence and horror now and in the future.
The people who erected Columbus statues did so out of admiration for the man who
brought white supremacy to the New World. It is unfortunate that they couldn’t have
poured their energy into more humanitarian projects.
Those who are determined to tear down Columbus statues do so in recognition of the
genocidal atrocities that greedy white supremacists have inflicted throughout the
Western Hemisphere--and far beyond!! Until every last Columbus statue has been laid
low white supremacy will continue hiding in plain sight and rotting the heart and soul of
The World's Greatest Democracy.
References
Alexander, Michelle, 2012. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of
Colorblindness. New York: The New Press.
Bigelow, Bill, 1998. "Once upon a genocide: Columbus in children’s literature." Rethinking
Columbus: The next 500 (1998): 47-55.
Columbus, Christopher, and Bartolomé de Las Casas, 1991. The Diario of Christopher
Columbus's first voyage to America, 1492-1493. Vol. 70. University of Oklahoma Press.
Corcos, Alain F., 1997. The myth of human races. East Lansing, MI: Michigan State
University Press.
Craven, Wesley Frank, 1942. "Columbus Discovered America." The Virginia Quarterly
Review 18.3 (1942): 451.
Deloria, Vine, 1995. Red Earth, White Lies: Native Americans and the Myth of Scientific
Fact. Fulcrum Publishing.
Foner, Nancy. "Black Immigrants and the Realities of Racism: Comments and Questions."
Journal of American Ethnic History 36.1 (2016): 63-70.
Fredrickson, George M, 2015. Racism: A short history. Princeton University Press.
Freehling, W. W., 1972. “The Founding Fathers and Slavery.” The American Historical
Review, 77(1), 81-93.
Graves, Joseph L. 2004. The Race Myth: Why We Pretend Race Exists in America. New
York: Dutton.
Guyatt, Nicholas, 2016. Bind Us Apart: How Enlightened Americans Invented Racial
Segregation. New York: Basic Books.
Hitler, Adolf, 2000. Mein kampf. Om Books International.
Horne, G., 2018. The apocalypse of settler colonialism: The roots of slavery, white
supremacy, and capitalism in 17th century North America and the Caribbean. NYU Press.
Jaimes, M. Annette, 1992. The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and
Resistance. South End Press.
Kusz, K.W., 2017. Trumpism, Tom Brady, and the reassertion of white supremacy in
militarized post-9/11 America. Sport and militarism: Contemporary and global
perspectives, pp.238-254.
Lehman, Paul R, 2016. The System of European American (White) Supremacy and African
American (Black) Inferiority. Xlibris Corporation.
Malott, C. S., 2011. “The Social Construction of the Dominant Psychological Paradigm:
Columbus, Slavery, and the Discourses of Domination.” In Critical Pedagogy and Cognition
(pp. 67-77). Springer Netherlands.
Mann, Charles C., 2005. 1491: New Revelations of the Americas before Columbus. New
York: Knopf.
Mann, Charles C., 2011. 1493: Uncovering the New World Columbus Created. New York:
Alfred A. Knopf.
McGettigan, Timothy and Earl Smith, 2016. A Formula for Eradicating Racism: Debunking
White Supremacy. New York: Palgrave.
Meloy, J. Reid, 1997. "The psychology of wickedness: Psychopathy and sadism."
Psychiatric Annals 27.9 (1997): 630-633.
Miller, Robert J., 2011. American Indians, the doctrine of discovery, and manifest
destiny. Wyo. L. Rev., 11, 329.
Miller, Robert J., Jacinta Ruru, Larissa Behrendt, Tracey Lindberg, 2010. Discovering
Indigenous Lands: The Doctrine of Discovery in the English Colonies. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
Montagu, Ashley. 1964. Man’s Most Dangerous Myth: The Fallacy of Race. Cleveland:
World Pub.
Newcomb, Steven T., 2008. Pagans in the Promised Land: Decoding the Doctrine of
Christian Discovery. Golden, CO.: Fulcrum Publishing.
Obama, Barack, 2008. "A More Perfect Union." The Black Scholar 38.1 (2008): 17-23.
Sapp, Jan, 2012. “Race Finished.” American Scientist 100 (2). p. 164
Smith, Andrea, 2015. Conquest: sexual violence and American Indian genocide. Duke
University Press.
Spelsberg, Thomas. 2011. The Myth of Race: Our DNA Defines Who We Are.
Rochester, NY: TCS Scientific Publishers.
Stephanson, Anders, 1996. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire
of Right. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Steuter, Erin, and Deborah Wills, 2010. "‘The vermin have struck again’: dehumanizing
the enemy in post 9/11 media representations." Media, War & Conflict 3.2 (2010): 152-167.
Sussman, Robert W., 2014. The Myth of Race: The Troubling Persistence of an
Unscientific Idea. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Todorov, Tzvetan, 1984. The conquest of America: The question of the other.
University of Oklahoma Press.
Wade, Nicholas, 2014. A Troublesome Inheritance: Genes, Race and Human History.
New York: Penguin.
Wolfe, P., 2006. “Settler Colonialism and the Elimination of the Native.” Journal of
Genocide Research, 8(4), 387-409.
Zinn, Howard, 2010. A People’s History of the United States. New York: Harper
Perennial.
Comments
Post a Comment