The Weekly Quill — Commercial Contagion
The QI Global CRE Outlook
All knowledge is power. Edited knowledge can be deadly. The area of the New World discovered by Christopher Columbus would have eventually been found, perhaps by a less savage man. He who world history characterizes as a grand explorer is also documented to have sanctioned the raping and pillaging of native Taínos. As?History.com?recounts, “Michele de Cuneo, a noble friend of Columbus, tells of a ‘Carib woman’ given to him by the admiral. When she fought back against his attempted sexual attacks, he ‘took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly...finally we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you she seemed to have been brought up in a school for harlots.’” There is no way to gloss over these brutal details, nor should there be, though few contemporary adult Americans know of them. As far as my research revealed, Howard Zinn’s 2005 book?A People’s History of the United States?was the first well-circulated book to recount the atrocities.
Knowing this now, some in the media have demanded the cancellation of New York City’s Columbus Day Parade. In its place should be Indigenous Day. Though a formal commemoration of the heritage of Native Americans is long overdue, some context on the logic of this “solution” is equally tardy.
One story of one man is an ideal starting place. In May 1906, Generoso Papa emerged from steerage on the S/S Madonna.?The son of farmers Fortunato and Fortunata Papa?was 15 years old. He soon found work?in New York City carrying water for construction crews for $3 a week. As was the case with countless immigrants, he settled in Italian Harlem, between 96th?and 125th?Streets, east of Lexington Avenue. The 1930 census tabulated the population of the tenement-filled at more than 100,000. At 81% of the neighborhood’s population, Italian Harlem consisted of first- or second- generation Italian Americans, a lower concentration vis-à-vis the Lower East Side’s Little Italy, but with three times its population density. By then, the last name “Papa” had been anglicized to “Pope.” He’d long since risen past his first set of promotions that landed him at construction supervisor and become the owner of Colonial Sand & Stone, which was then the largest sand and gravel company in the world.
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Danielle DiMartino Booth is founder and Chief Strategist at?Quill Intelligence