"The reason for respecting other cultures is to avoid doing harm to the people who live in them. But what if certain practices within the culture itself harm segments of the population? What claim, then, does the culture have to being above judgment? In South Africa, for instance, police are frequently dispatched to investigate muti killings, murders committed in order to present a traditional priest with a severed hand or genitals or heart so he can cure a disease or bring some business gain to a supplicant. 51 South African authorities seem to have zero tolerance for this sacred aspect of indigenous culture. Presumably so would the murder victims had they been given a say in the matter.

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“Furthermore, were not the slaveholders themselves cultural imperialists? They not only suppressed abolitionist dissent within their own society, but also built their ‘Southern way of life’ upon the labor of Africans who had been forcibly wrenched from their families, homelands, languages, and religions—that is, from their way of life.”