I just spent an hour writing my response to these readings and then wordpress kicked me out without saving my response, so now this response is going to be really rushed. 🙁

I had never been a fan of history, but always held the fact of “Columbus brought illness and took some Indians as slaves”. I didn’t (at all) ever grasp the gravity of wiping out half of an entire population within two years. The main thing that stuck out to me was how morality play a role for both Columbus and the Arawaks in different ways. For Columbus, his actions were always justified by religion and therefore (to him) morally right. For the Arawaks, it became morally better to murder their own children than to let them suffer by the hands of the Spaniards. I tried my best to read all of this through the lens of cultural relativism but I’m curious about each of these population’s relationship with morality compared to when the “discovery of the Americas” took place.

Also, I appreciated how Ziin challenged the readers by saying, “it is the job of thinking people…not to be on the side of the executioners”.

I am currently in Hayter’s LDST 101 course and his article made me think of his previous lecture on how women’s opposition to the constraints of typical housewife roles were, arguably, more successful at integrating this marginalized population into society than the civil rights movement for the African American population. The political party power struggle in Richmond is the perfect example of this. Overall, I found it interesting that even though the U.S. prides itself on the fact that we grant our citizens certain freedoms, we only historically care about protecting the rights of white men. Even with the little progress we’ve made in integrating our women and African American individuals, there are still legislative and corporate policies that work against them being full active members of society.