City resident Anthony Pizighelli is angry that the Board of Education changed the name of Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day. Pizighelli claims it’s a swipe at Italian Americans. The school board followed the lead of member Kate Rivera who argues that Columbus should not be viewed as a hero asserting “It’s just a matter of being accurate. Columbus didn’t find anything. There were already people here.” Columbus Day had been almost exclusively an expression of Italian heritage, but many Latinos also embrace his voyages to the settlement of Caribbean countries. Bridgeport has the largest Latino population in the state. Superintendent of Schools Fran Rabinowitz said the change took her by surprise, saying “I would like to research how we will implement the indigenous people holiday.”
So what do you say about this issue?
Here’s what Pizighelli has to say in a letter to OIB:
As an Italian American and a Bridgeport taxpayer, I am highly offended and disappointed that the city has chosen to disrespect its Italian residents by renaming Columbus Day, Indigenous People’s Day.
Honestly I’m tired of hearing you’re Italian … oh you’re white, that doesn’t count.
I don’t see them renaming black pride day or renaming the Hispanic day parade.
This city is insulting every Italian American by renaming Columbus Day.
Where is the equality for us Italians?
I attended a diversity day mandatory training when I worked for the state. They had many different cultures represented, when I asked why Italy wasn’t represented I was told you’re a white guy, you don’t count. I’m really tired of racism and being called a racist because I’m white. I judge people on who they are as a person, I could care less about skin color or ethnic backgrounds.
Besides isn’t Columbus Day a National Holiday, how does the Board of Education in a city rename it anyway?
Tony Pizighelli
Bridgeport Resident (for now)
Changing the name of the holiday to Indigenous People’s Day is ridiculous. What have the indigenous people done to take the place of Columbus day? To Ms. Rivera, try coming up with ideas that keep people in school.
Great job, Kate Rivera. Just got elected to have a say over the Bridgeport finances and budget and her grand entrance is to change the name of Columbus Day. The Superintendent was not even informed? Really? I think people who engage in these acts are unable to fundamentally change the real issues like the fact Bridgeport schools can’t balance a budget, so they pass these resolutions to make themselves feel good. It is more self-serving than serving the community. Because if the focus were on the real issues there would be no time for this because she would be talking to school leadership about how to get more funding for the schools. These celebrations are more symbolic than reality and give the community a false sense of empowerment because the reality children are attending a failing school does not change. Sure, there is a lot of debate about what Columbus did, but that is HER issue and she is imposing HER view without deliberation and consulting of the people in the schools. This is self-absorbed and a good example of just continuing to work in silos without even talking to school leadership. Other communities have adopted similar resolutions where indigenous day is celebrated but usually it is a community-wide effort and in some cases it is celebrated with Columbus day and does not replace it.
They were here, it’s not what they did, but what was done to them. Andy maybe if Columbus had actually set foot on this continent he would deserve something, certainly not to be remembered as the discoverer of “America.” There are many true Italian legends who deserve recognition and reverence.
Most students in the Bridgeport school system can’t even spell “indigenous.”
Kid, my daughter is in third grade, at Multi.
I’d wager against that, Kid. Our children are bright and as developed as any other in any other system. I witnessed a spelling bee last year that had words many adults would struggle with, don’t sell our children short, they will amaze you.
There’s a history and a culture to this land. There’ve been people living here for tens of thousands of years before Columbus supposedly discovered America.
Columbus shouldn’t be painted as a bold explorer to be celebrated, but rather as a war criminal who oversaw the genocide and enslavement of the Native American population. One can’t overlook a painful history of colonialism, enslavement, discrimination and land grabs that followed the Italian explorer’s 1492 arrival in the Americas.
“Learning about the history of Columbus and transforming this day into a celebration of indigenous people and a celebration of social justice … allows us to make a connection between this painful history and the ongoing marginalization, discrimination, and poverty that indigenous communities faced then and today.
Changing the name isn’t a slap in the face of Italians, instead it’s righting a wrong in American history that has lasted for almost 90 years when it was first proposed as a National holiday.
The closest Columbus got to the USA was the west indies. Columbus never dealt with the Indians in the USA.
This is a lot of BS and the BOE should have more important things to deal with.
Donald, what lasted for 90 years?
Andy, it’s been almost 80 years since Columbus Day became a National holiday in 1937. Pardon my error, (90) writing from a phone can be challenging.
No problem, I did not understand. I do now, thanks.
Columbus returned to Spain in chains. When he died he asked to be buried in Hispaniola (Santo Domingo/Haiti).
What the Italian American contributed to our country should have been considered in changing the name. Not Indigenous People’s Day!
As for Columbus discovering America is like my friends and myself travel to Easton where Lennie lives and I plant a flag in his front yard and I declare that I discovered a new land and I make Lennie and his family relocate to Bridgeport. Remember, Columbus was lost.
Ron, I’m lost in Redding.
Hey, my bad. So I could go over to Mario Testa’s property and place my flag on his property.
See, that’s what Columbus did, he got lost.
If Finch were allowed to take over the BOE it would have still been called Columbus Day. For all of you who opposed it, you’re also to blame.
What a sad commentary on what the board of education has degenerated to. Perhaps some educated and informed followers of OIB will share some thoughts on this action by the board.
Even better, temporary board member Kate Rivera should reveal the basis of her conclusions, perhaps the research she did for her doctoral dissertation.
Tom, Oklahoma City, Albuquerque, Portland, St.Paul Minneapolis, Olympia, Seattle, Berkeley, Lawrence, KA, Bexar County TX and the State of South Dakota all celebrate Indigenous People’s Day.
Is this a sad commentary or a lie that has finally run its course? White people always want to quote Martin Luther King when he talked about judging by the content of your character, well he also said a lie can’t live forever and that Columbus lie is finally coming to an end.
Okay guys, chill out. As soon as they find out the fact Christopher Columbus was a Jew and he wanted to discover new lands to save the Jews of Spain from persecution during the Courts of Inquisition, the holiday will be forgotten.
In the meantime, Columbus day has been celebrated as a day of ITALIAN HERITAGE. It has always been celebrated and organized with pride by the Italian Community. Why they felt it was necessary to change the name is beyond me. Bridgeport Schools are in bad shape. I would suggest Ms. Rivera spend her time trying to fix a very bad situation and not worry about holidays. You can call it what you want. It will always be Columbus Day and a Celebration of the Italian community. I can live with that.
Steven Aeurbach, just when I thought you couldn’t get ANY dumber, you go ahead and say something like this, AND TOTALLY REDEEM YOURSELF!!!!!!!!!
He’s got a point. I mean why are people calling Italians white? hahaha.
Tom White, Anthony Pizighelli, Andy Fardy and Derek may I suggest a book you guys should read? It’s called I See Color by Robert Pellegrino, Understanding and Reducing Our Hidden Racism: A White Perspective. It’s available on Amazon.
Whites who are honest about challenging racism and are willing to unlearn their racism while enhancing their understanding of its causes and effects, should read this book and encourage others to do the same.
Should blacks and Hispanics read it also? This is leftist guilt I don’t have. Donald, I am no more racist than you are.
Andy, I never said you’re racist, but the book explores the inherent racism all white people have without fully realizing their racism. I’ve read it and would suggest all people read it.
I have read a profile of Robert Pellegrino and as I suspected, 1. He is a lawyer 2. His field of legal practice is race relations. 3. He is a lawyer making money off of race.
BFD, I don’t need someone with a law degree to tell me how I am supposed to feel.
No Andy, you are absolutely wrong. Robert’s area of law is representing people about residential and commercial real estate, buying and selling. Nothing more, other than writing this book about his life’s experience and how he discovered, how in spite of his best efforts realized he did harbor certain racial biases. How can you make an assumption about a book without knowing its content or a person without knowing them and their life’s experience?
That’s his point, most white people don’t understand being racist is more than the N-word, shooting up a church and burning a cross on someone’s yard. Read the book and I’m sure you will see your family and friends in the same light he saw in his.
Andy, on this one you are mistaken, Robert Pellegrino is one of the nicest persons I have ever met in my life. Robert is not one of those self-hating whites who are leftist, there is no trying to make anyone feel leftist guilt.
Donald this is at the one of his papers I found on line. “Robert L. Pellegrino is partner in the law firm of Pellegrino & Pellegrino LLC. He has worked in the field of race relations for over 25 years”
I did not make this up, it was copied word for word.
I don’t think inherent racism is peculiar to honkies, Donald.
While the debate for to changing the name and not celebrate Christopher Columbus has its merits, as an Italian it wasn’t just the discovery of a New Continent unknown to Europe at the time. It was also the crossing of the Atlantic. Can we say we discovered a new planet with a new life form on it? It was a discovery because it was unknown to them.
www .youtube.com/watch?v=eKEwL-10s7E
If Americans want to change or cancel a holiday that commemorates the atrocities the American Indians suffered under Europeans, I think Thanksgiving would be a more suitable holiday that has a direct connection to their plight.
www .youtube.com/watch?v=tJE3KDxTbWI
Robert, a trip of a thousand miles start with the first step. The Columbus Day lie is that first step. Our youth has an inherent right to read about American history without the lies and whitewashing they must endure now.
A young black kid in Texas this year was reading his history book and it referred to Africans brought to American plantations between the 1500s and 1800s as “workers” rather than slaves. It defies credulity to think that in 2015 American history books are still whitewashing American history by referring to slaves as workers, as if my ancestors had any choice whatsoever.
Almost my whole life American history has been white people history leaving out the accomplishments of everyone else who made this country great. I for one applaud Kate Rivera for having the courage to expose another American history lie that has lived far longer that it should have lived. Good job, Ms. Rivera.
I’m not in disagreement with you about the truth. What do you think about changing the Thanksgiving holiday? Christ is portrayed as being blond hair and blue eyes and some say in the Bible he’s black with woolly hair (Afro). Personally I think he would look like the natives of the area in which he was born. The Bible is so gender biased and rampant with slavery. It says homosexuality and adultery are sins but marrying off or selling a young girl into slavery for sex and probably even boys, is okay. Should I renounce my belief in God?
“the courage to expose another American history lie”
Only on the Only In Bridgeport blog can you make statements suggesting history has not been properly recorded.
Oh Tom, really. I’m going to chalk that comment up as your attempt at humor.
HISTORY IS ALWAYS TOLD IN THE WAY IT WAS SEEN BY THE CONQUEROR, NOT THE CONQUERED. IT WAS ONLY THE EUROPEANS WHO THOUGHT THE WORLD WAS FLAT, OTHERS HAD BEEN TRAVELING THE WORLD BEFORE COLUMBUS’ JOURNEY.
Actually, only the church (Pope, Rome and all) thought the earth was flat. Sailors and scientists (Plato, Aristotle, Pythagoras) knew it was round for a long time. But since the church did all the writing we only have their gist on things. It was the printing press and not Galileo that discovered the earth was round.
Given the state of our schools you would have thought our Board of Education would have had more important issues to spend their time on.
Andy, don’t confuse working in the field of race relations with practicing law in the field of race relations. One has nothing to do with the other.
Day, if the Moors were black and they conquered Spain, how do blacks play into the history of Columbus’ voyage and Spain’s treatment of indigenous people?
www .youtube.com/watch?v=X_Xnc8ijkrA
Maybe not, but they both interact.
First, I think it is important to understand what it is to “discover.” If I see $10 on the ground and keep walking, then you see it and pick it up, who found the money? American and South American natives were prehistoric peoples. They had not discovered writing. The native peoples, for the most part, sold their land to the Europeans. The native people had no concept of land ownership, so, they thought they were taking the Europeans for a ride. That did not work out for them. Atrocities were committed by both sides. Currently, European atrocities are more popular.
Really?
Yes, really. Think about all the refugees from Syria, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, trying to get to western Europe. They have to cross from Turkey to Greece, the Mediterranean to Italy and Sicily. They are willing to risk their lives for a better life. Many are dying. The European Union is more or less antipathetic to the suffering, the French and the British especially saying “We don’t have the room” or “Not in my backyard.” It’s the worst humanitarian crisis to hit the continent since the late ’30s when tens of thousands of Jews fled the pogroms.
It is surprising the majority of the refugees are males, from teenagers to men in their 40s. There are very few babies or younger kids, there are also very few elderly. Makes one wonder.
That $10 was the property of someone else. Columbus didn’t discover America. It was already discovered.
It’s important to learn about all history, not just what fits a certain narrative. We all tend to want to judge past generations, myself included (it’s human nature) without attempting to fully understand the times and the mindset they lived in. We need to take a look at ourselves for someday we will be judged by future generations.
This is the clumsiest comment board of white bullshit I have ever seen. Columbus was a genocidal, rapist colonizer, and anyone who argues this is a celebration of Italian heritage is an idiot. If we had a holiday devoted to Adolf Hitler, and people wanted to change that, no one would be foolish enough to argue it’s a celebration of German heritage. Not all parts of history are meant to be honored. PS: y’all milquetoast Italians can just go ahead and stop saying you aren’t white.
The USA is named for an Italian. Let me guess, you want to change the name to United States of Indigenous People?
Genuinely trying to understand how this is at all a response to what I just said, Lennie. I’m saying we shouldn’t literally have a day set aside to celebrate him, again, because he is a “genocidal, rapist colonizer.” Not because he’s one who just so happens to be Italian. Frankly I don’t know enough about Vespucci to have any opinion him, but you’re using an example of a name change as something hyperbolic to make me look silly, right? But if he does in fact have a track record similar to that of Columbus, I don’t see how the idea of a name change is hyperbolic. If you take pride in your country, why should its namesake be someone horrible?
M, not trying to make you look silly. I do that to myself without even trying. Just confirming if your emphasis is on a person or ethnicity. You have cleared it up. Thank you.
Sorry if that came off aggressive, Lennie. Thanks for your understanding.
You know Columbus was genocidal and a rapist, How?
Tell me about the Spanish bullshit that appears here or are we supposed to believe it’s gospel because it was written by someone of Spanish descent.
Historical documents?? Literally his own diaries? Read your history, Fardy. Some Columbus quotes:
“While I was in the boat, I captured a very beautiful Carib woman, whom the said Lord Admiral gave to me. When I had taken her to my cabin she was naked–as was their custom. I was filled with a desire to take my pleasure with her and attempted to satisfy my desire. She was unwilling, and so treated me with her nails that I wished I had never begun. But–to cut a long story short–I then took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly, and she let forth such incredible screams that you would not have believed your ears. Eventually we came to such terms, I assure you, that you would have thought that she had been brought up in a school for whores.”
“Endless testimonies … prove the mild and pacific temperament of the natives …. But our work was to exasperate, ravage, kill, mangle and destroy.”
“And the Christians, with their horses and swords and pikes began to carry out massacres and strange cruelties against them. They attacked the towns and spared neither the children nor the aged nor pregnant women nor women in childbed, not only stabbing them and dismembering them but cutting them to pieces as if dealing with sheep in the slaughter house. They laid bets as to who, with one stroke of the sword, could split a man in two or could cut off his head or spill out his entrails with a single stroke of the pike. They took infants from their mothers’ breasts, snatching them by the legs and pitching them head first against the crags or snatched them by the arms and threw them into the rivers, roaring with laughter and saying as the babies fell into the water, “Boil there, you offspring of the devil!” Other infants they put to the sword along with their mothers and anyone else who happened to be nearby. They made some low wide gallows on which the hanged victim’s feet almost touched the ground, stringing up their victims in lots of thirteen, in memory of Our Redeemer and His twelve Apostles, then set burning wood at their feet and thus burned them alive. To others they attached straw or wrapped their whole bodies in straw and set them afire. With still others, all those they wanted to capture alive, they cut off their hands and hung them round the victim’s neck, saying, “Go now, carry the message,” meaning, Take the news to the Indians who have fled to the mountains. They usually dealt with the chieftains and nobles in the following way: they made a grid of rods which they placed on forked sticks, then lashed the victims to the grid and lighted a smoldering fire underneath, so that little by little, as those captives screamed in despair and torment, their souls would leave them ….”
As for Spanish bullshit. Please define for me what Spanish bullshit is. What is bullshit that is inherent to Spanish people? When I say white bullshit I’m talking about these roundabout ways you elderly white folk have of saying “I hate brown people,” including but not limited to the justification of genocide but stating things like “They had not discovered writing,” asking foolish questions like, “What have the indigenous people done to take the place of Columbus day?” etc. That’s white bullshit.
Name the book you got this information from and just so you know, they did not talk like that.
Roundabout way us old white folks have of saying I hate brown people. Now that is a prime example of Spanish bullshit. I have never heard anyone say they hate brown people. You are so full of it. Another thing is this Spanish bullshit about being mistreated and getting screwed here in America.
A letter written by Columbus’s childhood friend, Michele da Cuneo, and the book “The Devastation of the Indies.”
Who is mistreated and screwed? White people??? Please clarify.