I grew up calling myself “Italian.”

I never used “Italian-American,” partly because it’s fairly obvious that I am American and also because I didn’t want any grief from the tedious people who say things like “Why do you hyphenate yourself, we are all just Americans!”

Unfortunately, my relatives never bothered to teach me Italian, so I paid good money to learn it in college. And my grandmother refused to show me how to make pasta by hand, correctly assuming I would slice my fingers on the “chitarra,” I figured it out by myself.

That being said, I wasn’t a big booster of Columbus Day, or marches, or the other forced manifestations of my identity.

I live it in my faith, my food, my ferocity and my use of words that often begin with “F,” in both languages.

It’s also that I never understood why we had Black History Month, Hispanic Heritage Month, Asian Pacific Heritage Month, not to mention Pride Month, Trans Awareness Day — I’m sure if they try hard enough they will get a month — and all the other months that were somehow, without me noticing it, grafted onto the calendar.

Why, I thought, can’t we just thread appreciation for these rich and varied cultures throughout the entire year, and stop this seasonal patronizing.

But over the past few years, that has all changed.

Now, I not only make a big deal about Columbus Day, I am also celebrating for the entire month of October.

Recent events showed me, in the most brutal of ways, why those other months exist. Now, I get it.

Around the time of Black Lives Matter, people started looking around for things to start tearing down. No statue was safe from being a target of the Orwellian vandals who were not interested in educating about their own history, but simply wanted to erase the history of others.

Christopher Columbus was one of the fellows who began to represent all that the woke folk hated.

Instead of being the man who admittedly didn’t actually discover America but came pretty close because the Norwegian who got there first didn’t even know what he floated by, the wayfarer from Genoa became a genocidal maniac.

Not only that, they tried to argue that he wasn’t even Italian.

There is little to no evidence that Columbus engaged in a bloodthirsty campaign to eliminate the Taino Indians who were indigenous to the New World.

There is some evidence that he might have had Jewish blood in him, which is fine because there is a rich Italian Jewish tradition.

Most of all, there is more recent history that the reason Columbus was given a holiday was not to commemorate him per se, but rather to honor the Italian immigrants who had helped build this country.

More importantly, it was to recognize the greatest single lynching in the sordid history of this country, when 12 Italian immigrants were murdered in New Orleans for a crime they had not committed.

When I saw people, including some Italians I know and at least one Italian to whom I am related, start calling for the abolition of the holiday because they did not want to honor a “genocidal monster,” I began to realize that there were two possible problems here: either a lot of folks were misinformed, or a lot of folks were fully aware of the history and were simply bigots.

The first alternative is easily addressed by education. The second one can never be eradicated.

And since there will always be bigots, the only way to minimize what happened after BLM is to provide knowledge, facts, and do it with joy.

There really aren’t enough days in the year to paint a comprehensive picture of what Italians have given to this country. But we will take the 31 that everyone else is getting.

We will do it with the typical sense of dolce vita, mixed with the skepticism of those who were told that bread became flesh and wine became blood and believed it.

We will kick up our heels to the Tarantella, the poisonous spider, which has inexplicably become grandmom’s favorite wedding dance.

We will stuff ourselves with layers of carbohydrates marinating in additional carbohydrates and tell you that the Mediterranean diet is best.

And you will believe it.

We will not be offended if you point out that we romanticized gangsters, because at least our criminals had the most exceptional style.

You cannot imagine “Leave the gun, take the pierogis” becoming a classic line.

And we will be generous in sharing our magnificence with anyone who wants to celebrate life the way it was meant to be lived.

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Copyright 2025 Christine Flowers, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.

Christine Flowers is an attorney and a columnist for the Delaware County Daily Times, and can be reached at [email protected].