Bless my Italian-American mother's memory—her maiden name was Guida, and her parents were immigrants from southern Italy who never learned to speak English. But I won't be observing Columbus Day this Monday. Indeed, I stopped caring about it years ago. Traditionally a celebration of Italian-American pride and the Genoese explorer who "discovered" the New World, for decades the day has come to embody many of the worst excesses of identity politics, both among its champions and its detractors.
Whatever political and cultural purposes it might have once served, Columbus Day now functions as an annual showcase for ethnic grousing about real and imagined slights from generations or even centuries ago. We need less of that in today's America, especially from populations that are doing well (like Italian Americans), even as we need to be honest about our failures, in the past and the present, to live up to our ideals of pluralism, tolerance, and unity.
