The big discourse on twitter right now is ‘you can’t say Columbus was a racist monster because no one knew racism was bad in 1492,’ except Isabella I (yeah, that Isabella I) threw his ass in prison for being a racist monster. There are multiple contemporaneous accounts of Columbus in the Caribbean that are basically like “holy shit, this guy is a legit, Texas chainsaw massacre psychopath.” He was considered bad even then.
When there’s documentation that the queen who got the Spanish Inquisition rolling thought Columbus was bad, I feel like it means we can all feel good about establishing another holiday for mattress discounts in this country.
Yep. Contemporaneous accounts of him and De Soto often have the writer essentially going “what the FUCK are you doing, why are you like this.” People AT THE TIME knew it was fucked up just fine.
His crew wanted to mutiny and kill the man and we are all worse off for the fact that they didn’t.
In 1511, only 19 years after Columbus’s first voyage, a Dominican friar named Antonio de Montesinos said this to the Spanish colonists on Hispaniola:
“Tell me by what right of justice do you hold these Indians in such a cruel and horrible servitude? On what authority have you waged such detestable wars against these people who dwelt quietly and peacefully on their own lands? Wars in which you have destroyed such an infinite number of them by homicides and slaughters never heard of before. Why do you keep them so oppressed and exhausted, without giving them enough to eat or curing them of the sicknesses they incur from the excessive labor you give them, and they die, or rather you kill them, in order to extract and acquire gold every day.”
“Racism” was an unknown word (coined in the early 20th century) and perhaps a difficult concept to explain to 15th and 16th century Europeans. But they were fully capable of understanding that marching into some one’s country, and then immediately killing and enslaving them, was wrong. The fact that they did it any way is their own responsibility, and it’s not inappropriate for us to judge them for it.
I also want to point out that this kind of reasoning just assumes that people of color didn’t count when they say ‘nobody knew better back then’. I’m pretty sure they always knew it was wrong, but I guess only white people get to define morality for an entire era.
