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Good news, but the appeals aren’t over.

I strongly recommend applying for ASAP.

Small chance, but it might make a difference in getting it at all, depending on how a future ruling might go.

Supreme Court rejects request to block Biden student loan debt forgiveness program The Biden administration program will cancel up to $20,000 in student loan debt for millions of people. A Wisconsin group asked the Supreme Court to block it.

In case you didn’t know from my name, my face, and generally everything else about me, I’m Italian-American.

According to a DNA test conducted by Ancestry.com, I’m about as “Italian” as any native-born Italian is, by blood. I’m a confirmed Catholic, I’ve been to countless Italian Festivals, I consider visits to Boston’s North End to be a holy pilgrimage, and I’ve been gifted a malocchio so I can ward off evil spirits or become a complete stereotype.

For me, my ethnicity is utterly inescapable.

And I could not care less about Columbus Day, one way or another. Much of that has to do with why we celebrate Columbus Day in the first place.

On March 14, 1891, the single largest lynching in American history took place near New Orleans. The police chief was killed, the Mafia was blamed, and roughly 250 Italian-American immigrants were rounded up for the murder. Of them, nine were put on trial. Six of them were acquitted outright for a lack of evidence, and a mistrial was declared for another three.

The Mayor of New Orleans gave a speech naming the police chief “the victim of Sicilian vengeance" and calling upon the citizenry to "teach these people a lesson they will not forget." This wasn’t a one-off thing in the heat of the moment. He’d previously written that Southern Italians and Sicilians were, “[T]he most idle, vicious, and worthless people among us.” If any of that sounds familiar, it’s because the bigots still use roughly the same language for today’s Latino immigrants.

This wasn’t just one guy with a grudge against Italian-Americans, either. The newspaper the Daily States issued an editorial after the trial that effectively demanded blood in the streets:

“Rise, people of New Orleans! Alien hands of oath-bound assassins have set the blot of a martyr's blood upon your vaunted civilization! Your laws, in the very Temple of Justice, have been bought off, and suborners have caused to be turned loose upon your streets the midnight murderers of David C. Hennessy, in whose premature grave the very majesty of our American law lies buried with his mangled co**se — the co**se of him who in life was the representative, the conservator of your peace and dignity.”

It should come as little surprise, then, that a mob broke into the jail where 19 Italian-Americans were being held. Some were hung, with their bodies left dangling on display for hours. Others were shot, and more were beaten to death.

The death squad included Walter C. Flower (the future Mayor of New Orleans), John M. Parker (the future Governor of Louisiana), and the editor of another newspaper, the New Delta.

Far from condemning the lynching, the New York Times applauded it:

“These sneaking and cowardly Sicilians, the descendants of bandits and assassins, who have transported to this country the lawless passions, the cut-throat practices, and the oath-bound societies of their native country, are to us a pest without mitigation. Our own rattlesnakes are as good citizens as they...Lynch law was the only course open to the people of New Orleans.”

The very next year, President Benjamin Harrison declared that Columbus Day would be celebrated nationally as a one-time thing. They basically wanted Italian-Americans to just shut up about how they were being treated, so they were tossed a holiday and told to move on.

Of course, Columbus Day didn’t stop a jury from having Sacco and Vanzetti executed in 1927 largely for the crime of having Italian descendants. It didn’t stop the ensuing decades of bigotry and discrimination against Italian-Americans.

If the whole farce around Columbus Day sounds at all familiar to you, it’s because we just did it again. Reeling from years of brutal police violence, culminating with the protests after George Floyd’s death, the federal government declared Juneteenth a federal holiday just last year.

At least Juneteenth is a day worthy of national reflection. Christopher Columbus was a bad person at a time filled with mostly horrible people. I will neither honor him nor condemn him, and that has little to do with why I don’t celebrate his holiday. For me, it’s a reminder of the violence and hostility that was once a reality for Italian-Americans.

And as I’ve come to appreciate these past several years, the past can easily become reality again, either for Italian-Americans or any other ethnic or minority group.
https://www.pxramerica.com/columbusDay.html