Historic Injustices as Matters of the Present

Abstract

In this paper we engage with and contribute to the critical project of highlighting the dilemmas that arise from structurally unequal and unjust social, political, and institutional realities when dealing with past wrongs or, better phrased, historic injustices. We emphasise the present-time character of historic injustices. We think that there is a risk of allochronism in discussing historic injustices mainly as wrongs done in the past. This risk consists in making people forget that redressing these injustices is something to be done in an unjust present structured by domination, and that those very past wrongs and harms helped to shape the present-time condition of structural injustice. As the misplacing in the past phenomena that occur in the present and in one’s practical context, allochronism has the efect that people do not feel responsible for those present-time injustices that derive from wrongs done in the past. Our aim is to propose one way of dealing with this risk of misallocating responsibility (and thus accountability), which consists in intersecting the notion of historic injustices with the notion of coloniality. After showing how an approach oriented by the notion of coloniality helps surmount the negative efects of allochronism and provides a signifcant complement to a structural approach to injustice (Sect. ‘Coloniality and Responsibility for Justice’), we turn to Frantz Fanon (Sect. ‘Fanon’) and José Carlos Mariátegui (Sect. ‘Mariátegui’) to illustrate the relationship between coloniality and justice and how it is possible to render a construal of ‘past wrongs’ without losing sight of their pervasiveness in the present time.