Wow. You have fundamentally no understanding of how whitewashed his legacy is. Let's talk about the poem that we teach our Children. One of the lines that always stuck out to me
The Arakawa natives were very nice; They gave the sailors food and spice.
When the reality was the Arawaks attempted to fight back against Columbus's men but lacked their armor, guns, swords, and horses. When taken prisoner, they were hanged or burned to death. Desperation led to mass suicides and infanticide among the natives. In just two years under Columbus's governorship more than half of the 250,000 Arawaks in Haiti were dead.
But it's a cute poem, right? Burying the lede doesn't count as honest education in my view. If we were honest about Columbus' legacy, there would be literally nothing to celebrate.
Take Churchill for instance.
I'm Indian-American and my grandfather was a big part of Indian independence, so this is going to be a hard place for us to find middle ground because well, I really have a hard time seeing the difference between Churchill and Hitler. And if Americans/Europeans were being honest with themselves, they'd admit that the only reason that they prefer Churchill to Hitler is because a) he won and b) he was killing brown and black people instead of Europeans and Jews.
I guess the point you're trying to make is that while we lionize Churchill, we still acknowledge the shitty parts of his legacy? I'm going to attack this argument in a two ways
This first one should be obvious. The Taino and Arawaks were exterminated. There are well over 1.2B Indians, just in India. There is institutional and cultural memory of what Churchill did. Do you want to know why my great grandmother was deathly afraid of dogs? Do you know what happens in a famine? I haven't forgotten what he did to my people and my children won't either. But the Taino and Arawaks aren't that lucky.
Again, would we acknowledge his legacy if people from former colonial states didn't speak up? As of right now, 50% of British people think that they left their colonies better off than they found them. Only 15% think worse off. And don't even try to make the argument that India was better off because of the English, they bled India dry, massacred our people and basically dropped a hand grenade into the works when they left.
All of that is to be reckoned with and a monument is a vehicle for that.
Monuments without proper education are just symbolic rallying cries for blind nationalists. The British know jack shit about the bones that their Empire was built on. Let them show a little shame, let them give back what was taken and then maybe, just maybe, I'll accept that they've reckoned with anything.
How about they start with sending everything in the British Museum back where it belongs? How about they rip the fucking jewels from her majesty's crown and send them back to India where they belong. Then I'll accept that those fucks have done some reckoning.