Ironic, as Columbus himself was just a hired gun, a captain driving Portuguese ships, more like an Uber driver, except he didn’t own the car. The Portuguese were so dissatisfied with him they kicked him out after his second run and went about on their continued escapades of enslaving 8 million or more black Africans.
The irony of course is that the Italians were considered like blacks when they arrived in the South starting in the 1880s. They weren’t thought to be white, and white supremacists in power lynched them like black Americans in Louisiana and Florida. It was only because that caused an international incident, forcing the American government to pay reparations to the families of the lynched to the Italian government that things changed. They were given Columbus day in the early 1930s to turn them into white Americans, driven by the racial tension and animus up North, like in New York City.