There is not a child growing up in the US – or influenced by the pervasive middle class entertainment of The Simpsons – who does not know the answer to the question, “Who discovered America?”. However, the answer that usually captures the notion of Columbus paints a rather ugly picture. First, it destroys thousands of years of indigenous peoples’ development, culture, and history on the land mass, placing a very White and Christian veneer across the swept away histories of the ‘natives’, effectively rendering them subhuman or animal. Second, it assumes Columbus knew what he’d discovered – possession of knowledge – which he didn’t: he assumed he was, in line with the at the time prominent theory of the ‘Island of Earth’, in Asia, and this is why the Indigenous population of North America are called ‘Indians’. Finally, the name ‘America’ wasn’t even coined by Columbus; it was coined by a fellow called Vespucci, whose first name, when masculinised, is America (feminised it’s Amerigo) on a map printed in 1507. So the real question remains, why do people take things for granted as knowledge? Maybe because they’re easy to understand, with a nice White Christian hero triumphing over the hordes of godless, easily forgotten others; or maybe because a paradigm distorts knowledge accepted during the period: Columbus did a very good job of maintaining the worldview of the period (the theory of the Island of Earth: the Earth is one part land and six parts water) and thus he is remembered, rather than the [correct] challenger of the worldview of the time Vespucci, who forwarded the progress of knowledge; and now, in the contemporary, none of that really seems to matter because the schools seem far too trapped in their paradigm of disinformation to care. (Or maybe the ideal is to challenge the normative taken-for-granted answer to learn the points I set out above, which will not yield you points on a test; but you’ll feel the better for it.) :D
Posted on: Mon, 10 Mar 2014 07:38:42 +0000
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