Michelangelo, Unfinished Slave
2,116 words
Translations: Czech, French, Spanish
One of the perennial accusations against white colonial societies around the globe—in the Americas, Africa, and the Antipodes—is that they are morally illegitimate because other people were there first. This is what I call the “autochthony argument,” from the Greek “αὐτόχθων,” meaning “springing from the land,” i.e., indigenous. According to this argument, the original inhabitants of a land are its rightful owners (“finders-keepers”), and it is a violation of these rights for other peoples to displace them. (more…)