FROM KING FEATURES SYNDICATE
BY BOB FRANKEN
NATIONAL HYPOCRISY DAY
There was something disconcerting about Monday, Oct. 11. On the very same day, we commemorated both a seriously oppressed group and a symbol of the group’s oppressors.
Christopher Columbus discovered America in the larger sense (his first stop was an island in the Bahamas in 1492), and he ran roughshod over any indigenous people he encountered.
But Columbus was born in Genoa, Italy, and the Italians had strong lobbying groups. So with no mention of the Native Americans he abused, 300 years later, in 1792, the U.S. established the first Columbus Day.
Then, in 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson declared Columbus Day a federal holiday. But it took 53 years — until a week or so ago — for President Joe Biden to make it official: It will be Indigenous Peoples’ Day as well as Columbus Day. He was pretty busy that day reciting proclamations.
But it’s always some day or week or month in the United States, and then we go on to the next one and forget about the group we were just memorializing. There’s Black History Month, where we honor the African Americans, who first came over as slaves, then became almost slaves under Jim Crow segregation, and then whatever we have today, where we discriminate while pretending to be one happy family.
We still make history with that one. Fox News has made a mint exploiting and bitterly complaining about the teaching of history that really happened. They scare their listeners with terms like CRT, which means critical race theory. Those outraged would prefer to keep things the way they are, just maintaining it never happened and whiting out the Black experience. But anyway, that’s February.
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