Columbus Day is stupid, but it is a myth that he is responsible for genocide or is the progenitor of the transatlantic slave trade
I think there's a lot of evidence he was responsible for both.
Genocide is the deliberate killing of an ethnic group. Columbus enslaved many natives, but the high death toll as a result of his arrival was due to disease, not an intentional policy of extermination.
The transatlantic slave trade was started by the Portuguese twenty years after Columbus' death.
Wrong! He engaged in Leopold II/Pol Pot-esque actions against the Taíno.
You are actually both correct. The vast majority of natives were killed by unintentional passing of diseases to which the native peoples had no immunity. But nevertheless, Columbus had his men commit widespread massacres and horrific torture of the surviving population, not to mention serial rape and whole scale human trafficking.
