Dear Diary,
You know what one of the hardest things about being brown is? It is to constantly hear people referring to the Native Americans, the indigenous people of the Americas, as Indians. Being brown and having to listen to conversations describing the “false” Indians is like listening to someone with long and sharp fingernails slowly and arrogantly scratch a chalkboard. And who do I have to thank for all this pain of hearing the glorious label of my race and culture be thrown upon a group of people all the way on the other side of the world? I guess I should blame Christopher Columbus.
Christopher Columbus was dying to go to India, I mean who wouldn’t want to go there. But unfortunately Christopher Columbus’s GPS failed him and he ended up in the United States. However, Christopher Columbus being the genius that he was, thought he was in India, and deemed the first people he saw to be none other than the legendary Indians, keepers and creators of the prized spices that he sailed so far to get his hands on. Unfortunately, for some reason the mistakes of Christopher Columbus are still alive in today’s society, 519 years later, and I, a brown kid, am blogging about it.
I mean, How did one man have the power to falsely name an entire group of people, theres even an Indian Removal Act (should be Native American Removal Act). How did Christopher Columbus get so many people, even the government to go with that term? Also, theres a baseball team that goes by the name of the Cleveland Indians. CLEVELAND has nothing to do with India. Most Indians don’t even know where Cleveland is! How did the Indian community not previously confront this atrocity, the population of Indians (the real ones) ( I should not even need that previous parenthesis, but unfortunately that’s the world we live in) is exponentially more than that of the Native Americans.
I wish I could go back in time, right when Christopher Columbus came to the United States and inform him that he wasted a lot of money and peoples’ time traveling to the wrong side of the world! A term I coined in my previous post What Can Brown do for you?, would be quite adequate to describe the actions of the foolish Christopher Columbus. Christopher Columbus drown. If the meaning of my term (which is not related to water) does not seem to find itself in your vocabulary, after reading this post, or perhaps in a new tab you could open my handy Wordbook tab, and read all about the meaning of this word.
I hope those who began reading this post as users of the term Indian to describe the indigenous people located in the Americas, now know that they were previously mistaken. I hope that somehow I can end this problem someday, but right now it is just a dream, just another blog post by a regular and ordinary brown kid. I want to coin a new term right now, but I just can’t, I’m too worked up, I must depart before I break my computer in half due the exorbitant amount of anger rushing through my veins, filling my blood, making my body about to erupt with a powerful vengeance unseen by the rest of the world.
P.S. I do not disrespect Native Americans in any way, the only thing that upsets me is the fact that they are adressed by the name Indian. I have no problems or issues with the group of people at all.
Brown Kid
Diary of a Brown Kid 