The Trump administration recently took a position on a man with a documented record of genocide and enslavement. “In this White House,” a spokesman announced last week, following the installation of a statue on the grounds of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, “Christopher Columbus is a hero.”

It is worth pausing on that word. A hero, in the civic sense, is not merely someone whom people admire. It is someone whose story the country agrees to tell in a particular way. Heroism is a narrative decision.

When the White House installs a statue and declares the man it depicts a hero, it isn’t making a historical claim. It is making an editorial one, asserting the authority to decide which version of the past gets to occupy the seat of American power – or to stand on its grounds.

Columbus’ historical record is not ambiguous. The Indigenous Taíno population collapsed within decades of his arrival as forced labor, starvation and violence ravaged entire communities. He authorized the enslavement of Indigenous people and the trafficking of women and girls. His own contemporaries documented as much. The accounts existed, and powerful people repeatedly and deliberately set them aside so they could tell a more beneficent story about themselves.

Honoring Columbus at the White House does not require discovering these facts. It requires deciding they do not matter.

This is hardly without precedent. Monuments such as this have never been neutral. Leaders and acolytes alike use them to simultaneously honor and terrorize. That’s why hundreds of........

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