Locke argued that private property comes about - is earned - as a result of mixing labor with land. Now, in a colonial system - and here the North American case is easiest to describe - the labor was provided by enslaved Africans, and the land was provided by Native people who were being dispossessed. So the Lockean formula, as it worked out in the American colonial situation, was kind of color-coded: the mixture of black labor and red land produced white private property.

What It Means

This is a placeholder explanation generated by the low-overhead model. It interprets "Locke argued that private property comes about - is earned - as a result of mixing labor with land. Now, in a colonial system - and here the North American case is easiest to describe - the labor was provided by enslaved Africans, and the land was provided by Native people who were being dispossessed. So the Lockean formula, as it worked out in the American colonial situation, was kind of color-coded: the mixture of black labor and red land produced white private property." in the context of "Patrick Wolfe, What is settler colonialism?" to mean that wisdom is timeless.