nah, let’s keep that garbage out of public view. do we really need to remember a guy that not only didn’t find america but then was so shitty to the people he did find that the queen that paid for his trip cut her ties?

We've got a ton of scrap yards who'd probably pay better.

I prefer the annual tradition of Columbus' statue being publicly vandalized and defiled.

Well, I'll give Paolino credit, recharacterizing Columbus as a figure of Italian-American pride is cunning.

That framing will allow for the downplaying of complaints from minoritized groups who don't consider Columbus to be aspirational by invoking the historically minoritized status of Italians. The goal, it seems, is to recast Columbus not as a national hero but rather as an ethnically-specific one.

It's all just sleight of hand, though. The statue was taken out of public display for a reason, and it had nothing to do with anti-Italian sentiment.

I wouldn't mind having the statue in my apt. It's a sweet statue. You could put different hats on it.

Melt it down. Sell the bronze scraps.

They should put it on federal hill

will he shove it up his ass?

I mean, fuck this genocidal dickhead, but “Columbus as a symbol of Italian immigrant pride” isn’t a brand new idea. https://time.com/6104176/christopher-columbus-italian-american/

There is some interesting scholarship that points to Columbus being Portuguese.

Being the number one scumbag in Rhode Island is seemingly an incredibly difficult venture yet Paolino always manages to anoint himself with the crown lol.

Kinda wanna see the steel yard get it and watch their classes tear it apart and mold it into something new. PVD should donate it to the BIPOC class they run.

He didn't come up with this idea. The Italian American Anti Defamation League started a national Columbus campaign nearly a hundred years ago. Back then, Italians weren't considered white and were discriminated against across the nation. Someone decided that pitching Columbus as a white explorer who discovered these lands would help bigots embrace Italians. It kind of worked. But that was then and this is now.

I feel like it's being lost in the conversation that no modern American has an issue with Columbus because he was Italian.

The negative sentiment exists because Columbus was, charitably, a somewhat careless credit-stealer who failed upward and ended up way out of his depth, whose major claim to fame was accomplished by someone else 500 years prior.

Less charitably, he was a ruthless mercenary colonizer blinded by the promise of wealth whose exploration directly led to hundreds of years of oppression and subjugation that some have termed a genocide.

The recasting of Columbus as an Italian Hero doesn't jive with a modern understanding of his role in America's history.

Second I hear "former mayor buys" you automatically know it's gonna be Paulino.

No one is recasting him as a hero today. That was done by Italian Americans a lifetime ago and it was an effective strategy. Modern Americans have a much broader understanding of history and humanity than was commonly available back then. That was then, this is now.

Only if Silvio Dante doesn't buy it first.

I've never understood why this was such a big deal.

I mean you have monuments of President's that had a hand in the genocide of the native indigenous people down to the current %2.

yeah and we would be cool with getting rid of those too. fuck andrew jackson.

WJAR is reporting that Paolino's offer is $50k.

Former Providence mayor offers $50K for Columbus statue

Because people who type away on IPhones made in Chinese slave labor factories while wearing shoes manufactured by Indian children get offended by old Bronze Statues of dead white guys/Ginzos