If you believe the federal government, the Monday respite that we receive in early October is known as Columbus Day, named for the Italian explorer and inexplicable American cultural icon. According to old horrible textbooks written by dead white people, brave hero Christopher Columbus risked everything  and discovered America. Leaving a decrepit Europe where simpletons thought the Earth was flat and that the edge of the world was hanging out somewhere in the Atlantic, Columbus and his steadfast crew found the New World and ushered in a new era of history. 

Going by naming conventions alone, Columbus has an outsized presence in the American psyche. He lends his name to a South American country of 50 million people, to the Canadian province of British Columbia, and the capital and largest city of Ohio. Oh, and don’t forget about the fingerprints he’s left on America’s national capital. Ever think about what the “C” in Washington D.C. was for more than five seconds? Yeah, that’s for him. 

If you ask anyone with a heart or brain, the holiday observed in October should be a remembrance of the diverse and vibrant cultures and peoples of aboriginal America. Whether the name the day  goes by is “Indigenous People’s Day,” “Native American Day” or “First Nations Day,” the sentiment is the same. Instead of honoring the European colonial efforts that brought those nations to cultural and demographic near-extinction, the holiday should be spent commemorating their past, present and future as part of the indelible American experience. 

Let’s get this out of the way now: Even if Columbus wasn’t a genocidal maniac — which should disqualify anyone from having their own holiday — he’s a marginal figure who shouldn’t be honored. There are thousands of 16th century morons in the annals of history who massacred non-Europeans and thought they were incredibly cool for taking part in these massacres, but how many of them are recognized by the federal government? Combine his irrelevance with his moral repugnance, and suddenly Columbus’ continued veneration is beyond baffling. 

First, Columbus did not bravely announce the world was round to a bunch of flat-Earth buffoons. Europeans had known the Earth was round since the days of Ancient Greece, whose mathematicians managed to calculate the rough size of the planet using a few measures of wood and the setting sun. Columbus’ stroke of genius was just getting the size of the Earth hilariously wrong, thinking Japan was a good 13,000 miles closer to Spain than it is in reality. 

Second, Columbus didn’t “discover” anything when he arrived in what we now know as the Bahamas. At that point, humans had inhabited the so-called “New World” from the end of the Ice Age. Even the remote Bahamas had maintained a steady human presence since the 11th century. When Columbus set foot on the continent, he unwittingly existed alongside highly advanced and robust civilizations like the Maya and the Inca. Pretending that the Americas were virgin territory ripe for settlement is an act of pure fiction. 

Even if Columbus was the amazing pioneer he’s cracked up to be, consider this quick geography refresher: The Bahamas are not the United States. There are plenty of Caribbean countries that could theoretically trace their founding  to Columbus, but the U.S. is not one of them. In fact, Columbus failed to recognize that he had come across a new continent at all, stubbornly believing that he had discovered a new island chain off the coast of India. There’s a reason this continent is known as America and not Colombia: Mapmaker Amerigo Vespucci actually bothered to wonder if the new territories Columbus had stumbled upon were in fact a new continent altogether. 

Furthermore, Columbus was far from the first European to set foot in the New World. Leif Erikson and his fellow Vikings made it to Newfoundland around the same time that the Bahamas were being settled by natives of South America. As memorably depicted in the modern masterstroke “SpongeBob SquarePants,” Leif gets his own holiday on Oct. 9, but no one’s getting out of work or school for that one quite yet. 

Third, let’s get back to that whole genocidal maniac business — kind of a big oversight there. In the very first correspondence he sent back to his Spanish overlords, Columbus wrote,“It appears to me, that the people are intelligent, and would be good servants,” and continues, “If it please our Lord, I plan to carry home six of them to your Highnesses, that they may learn our language.” From minute one, Columbus was thinking about how to enslave and kidnap the Taino people who called Guanahani home, and he wasn’t set on improving with time. 

As governor of Hispaniola, the island now split into Haiti and the Dominican Republic, Columbus’ conduct was beyond appalling. Most of the island’s inhabitants found themselves forced into slavery under the Spanish encomienda system, with Columbus himself reserving the ultimate right to buy and sell humans at will. Furthermore, his idea of justice involved responding to unrest by parading the dismembered bodies of proclaimed criminals through the streets.  

Any Spanish encounter with a previously uncontacted group under Columbus’ command invariably ended with the native population being sold into slavery and any resistors brutally murdered. 

In short, there is absolutely nothing worth honoring Columbus for in the slightest. Columbus Day’s persistence in the face its inherent awfulness is largely the product of the Italian-American community, who looked to the Genoan explorer as a cultural hero in a time of pervasive anti-Italian sentiment. 

The tide appears to be turning, per a Oct. 7 report from the Associated Press, Columbus, Ohio will no longer be celebrating its namesake holiday, instead using the day off to honor veterans. Other American cities have gone even further in this regard, choosing instead to recognize Indigenous People’s Day. Los Angeles, Denver, Seattle, San Francisco and Cincinnati are just some of the cities and municipalities that have put Columbus Day in the history books.

Perhaps it's time for more city governments and city institutions to follow in their lead and finally banish Columbus Day from our collective memories. Ceasing to celebrate a homicidal racist isn’t censorship, just merely a righting of long-standing historiographical wrongs. Keep the man himself in our collective cultural memory, but in the same manner we remember other historical atrocities and genocides.