Episode 20 - Reparations (feat. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò)

Transcript

Ellie: 0:07

Hi, I'm Ellie Anderson,

David: 0:09

And I'm David Peña-Guzmán. Welcome to Overthink.

Ellie: 0:12

The podcast where two friends,

David: 0:14

who who are also professors,

Ellie: 0:16

put philosophy in dialogue with the everyday.

David: 0:18

Because big ideas are within everyone's reach.

Ellie: 0:30

Just a month into governing, the Joe Biden administration said that they will be looking into a plan for reparations. Basically, they're putting together a commission to look into the history of slavery in the US, as well as how it's harmed African-American and Black folks in the US through discriminatory government policies after slavery.

David: 0:48

In some sense, it seems like we're entering a new phase of political discourse in the United States around the history of slavery and its ongoing effects. Reparations have been discussed at least since the end of slavery over 150 years ago, but have recently started to make a comeback into the mainstream, to some extent thanks to an article that Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote in 2014 in The Atlantic entitled "The Case for Reparations," where he talks about the importance of reparations for Black Americans who are descendants of formerly enslaved people. And as a result of this article, Coates went on to testify in front of Congress only a couple of years ago in 2019 to make this case before lawmakers, hoping to make what was previously a theoretical argument into an institutional reality.

Ellie: 1:36

And you know, I think one of the things that's really powerful about Ta-Nehisi Coates' original argument about this in 2014 is that his article focuses on a single individual story: that of Clyde Ross. And so Nehisi Coates' original article really trades on his power as a writer to enlist the feelings of readers through crafting a compelling story, in this case, a true story.

David: 2:00

Yeah, and I think there's a way in which he humanizes reparations by tracing the story of this one Black man, Clyde Ross, who was born in 1923, and throughout the article, what Ta-Nehisi Coates does is takes us through the life of this man from his childhood in Mississippi to his adult life in Chicago, pinpointing all the ways in which wealth was stolen from his family first and subsequently from him by white society, uh, including by private individuals who would literally come and steal his family's property when he was a child, to government officials would fabricate stories about back taxes that were never paid as a way of appropriating their property, all the way to his life as an adult trying to become a home owner in Chicago and dealing not only with extremely predatory and racist practices on the hands of real estate agents and lawyers, but also redlining practices by the newly established Federal Housing Administration. And so what you see in this article is essentially a biography of a Black man told from the story of the ways in which Black wealth is stolen by a set of institutions, some of them private, some of them public, some of them somewhere in between, that are designated to effectively take the product of Black labor and profit off of that.

Ellie: 3:26

And in focusing on practices like redlining, what we see is that reparations for slavery are so far from enough, for those who talk about the importance of reparations, because well after slavery, there have been all kinds of formal and informal policies, as well as laws, that serve to prevent Black Americans in the US from accruing intergenerational wealth, from having access to jobs and education, and these sorts of things that really, really multiply and proliferate throughout the entire social sphere.

David: 4:04

Today, we're talking about reparations.

Ellie: 4:07

Why are an increasing number of Americans today arguing that reparations are important?

David: 4:12

How have reparations been implemented in the past and how do experts believe that they should be implemented in the future?

Ellie: 4:18

And we talk with philosopher Olufemi O. Taiwo about the importance of broadening our understanding of reparations beyond individuals, for things like climate change.

David: 4:30

Every time I learned statistics about the disparity of racial wealth distribution in the United States, I feel as if I don't quite understand how deep the disparities run. So for example, I recently found out that white families in the United States have on average 10 to 20 times greater wealth than the average Black family. And conceptually, maybe I already knew that, but 10 to 20 times is the sort of thing that hits you in your bones.

Ellie: 4:57

Yeah, that is unbelievably stark.

David: 4:59

Yeah, it's exorbitant, and most Americans apparently have no idea just how stark that gap is. So for example a 2019 study found that the average net worth of a white family is $171,000. Compare that to that of a Black family, which is $17,150.

Ellie: 5:22

Yeah. And almost the respondents vastly underestimated this gap, even when they knew it existed, that racial wealth disparities in the US are obvious and well documented, they underestimated by 80% the severity of this gap. And I think that ignorance around these realities is really part of why the majority of Americans are against reparations. So according to various polls, over half of Americans, although not much more than half, don't think the US should pay descendants of enslaved people. Poll from the AP News Center for Public Affairs found that only 15% of white Americans are in favor of reparations, whereas 74% of Black Americans are in favor of them.

David: 6:03

I think it's important to underline the fact that black American support for reparations isn't really just about the economic disparities and the horrifying legacy of slavery. It is also about this sense that there has been an unfulfilled promise in the history of American politics, because the federal government never gave them what the federal government itself formally recognized was owed to them. So here, I'm thinking about the infamous "40 Acres and a Mule" policy that came in the immediate aftermath of the Declaration of Emancipation, where the federal government said that formerly enslaved people had a right to reparations in the form of land, and famously a mule, right? So the idea was that the federal government would confiscate a segment of land on the Eastern seaboard of the United States, running from South Carolina down to Florida, and it would redistribute that land to formerly enslaved people. This was formally announced in 1865 by William T. Sherman, who was a Union general, after having a conversation with about 20 leaders of the Black community, where he asked, "What does the community need?" And the answer was overwhelmingly, "We need land." And so this land was put aside for this purpose, and a number of Black people then moved into this land. But when Andrew Johnson came to power, it was taken away. And in fact, in many cases, it was given back to the very white plantation owners who had previously owned it.

Ellie: 7:38

Yeah and I think we see a few things here. One is that the calls for reparations in the form of land and a mule were made by leaders of the Black community who were in the best position to address their communities needs. But of course, then the federal government's like, "Oh yeah, sure. Actually, nevermind." And then just kind of like takes that away and strips the very agency that Black folks were led to believe that they would now finally have. And in fact, extremely perversely, it ended up being slave owners in many cases who received reparations. And so slave owners who were loyal to the Union actually received $300 for every enslaved person who was freed. So slave owners got reparations, but enslaved peoples didn't.

David: 8:25

Yeah. I mean, that's the most American thing that you can imagine. It's like, "We are opposed to reparations. Um, no, actually we will do them for Black people and take them away. And do them for the white slave owners in the form of both land and money."

Ellie: 8:39

Oh, and then the rest of you, you just have to pull yourselves up by your bootstraps.

David: 8:43

Yeah. And immediately thereafter, we're going to institute Jim Crow. So after the federal promise for 40 acres and a mule broke down, during the Reconstruction period, it seems that talks about reparations dropped out of the mainstream until the second half of the 20th century, when they reappeared in a series of other contexts. The sociologist John Torpey has made the argument that in the second half of the 20th century, reparations claims made an appearance in three areas. One was in relation to World War Two. Another one was in connection to state-sponsored acts of terrorism, especially in Latin America. And the final one is in connection to the ongoing effects of colonialism and neocolonialism. So in these three areas, we see discourse around reparations in relation to different communities and with slightly different justifications.

Ellie: 9:34

Yeah, and so reparations were implemented in some pretty big ways in these various domains. If you take World War II, for instance, we have the establishment of the state of Israel, right. We have reparations for Japanese Americans who were interned and who in many cases had their land ripped away from them, their livelihoods taken away from them. So there were some reparations, although for many that was insufficient relative to the harms.

David: 9:58

Yeah. And so, for example, in connection to what Torpey calls state-sponsored terrorism, he talks about the ways in which a number of Latin American regimes made a lot of people disappear. Uh, so this is the famous case of what in Spanish we call los desaparecidos, people who are deemed terrorists, and then suddenly they're nowhere to be found anymore. All the records of their existence are erased. And in that context, a lot of people have called for reparations, not only in the form of payouts to their descendants, but also more symbolic acts like expunging the criminal records that were fabricated by the states. So it really highlights how varied reparations can be and how context sensitive they can be.

Ellie: 10:43

I think sometimes when we think about reparations, it seems like this radical political move, but like in the case that you just mentioned, David, of those who were disappeared in Latin America, the simple call on behalf of family members to get a buyout for those who were killed is literally what a life insurance policy is, right. And so like, they're asking for the bare minimum.

David: 11:02

And the bare minimum sometimes as a recognition of the existence of these people whose legal status was denied by the states that made them disappear. The bar is simply a recognition of the fact that these people were. And in connection to the last category that Torpey talks about, which is colonialism and neocolonialism, this is where he fits the discussion around reparations for descendants of formerly enslaved people, especially in the United States, although that has been a conversation that has been had in other places as well.

Ellie: 11:35

And so is Torpey's point to draw attention to places where reparations have been implemented, or is it a more prescriptive claim that there should be reparations in these three domains of World War II, state-sponsored terrorism, and colonialism?

David: 11:48

Well, uh, his claim seems to fall somewhere in between where he says it's in these three areas that we see reparations claims unfolding as normative demands that correct a historical injustice. And so what is important about reparations claims in these areas is that they don't simply make a utilitarian argument about ways to move forward, and so reparations are not simply something that is going to create economic efficiency or that is going to help society run a little bit more smoothly. His claim is that in these areas, we see claims about reparations being a compensatory right, a normative entitlement on the part of victims for a historical injustice that was perpetrated maybe against them, or maybe against their ancestors. So it's about that normative dimension taking form.

Ellie: 12:35

Yeah, and I think what's also important to point out here with respect to reparations is a pretty obvious fact that they have to do with things that happened in the past. Reparations discourse shows to us the fact that ethical claims are not just made in the present, between individuals who might harm each other; rather ethics is an intergenerational task, in many cases, where things that happened in the past persist as harms into the present and, in this case, descendants feel they have a right to make an ethical claim about something that happened in the past.

David: 13:07

And legal experts who specialize on figuring out the legal framing for reparations will talk about two different approaches to them. One of them is literally called the forward looking approach, which treats reparations as justified in terms of the positive effects that they will have. So again, this is a utilitarian argument. And the second approach, which is the backwards looking one, which really emphasizes not only that compensatory dimension, the fact that they repair a harm that has been done in the deep past, but also bring to light the importance of reparations having a symbolic dimension. So think about something like the importance of an apology for slavery, an apology for Japanese American internment, an apology for apartheid and so on. The value of the backwards looking approach seems to be that it really explains what is unique about reparations, as opposed to other social programs that might try to alleviate disparities between the races, for example, but that are not necessarily tied to a particular historical event.

Ellie: 14:13

Yeah. I want to think a little bit about the collective responsibility that's involved here. In the context of reparations for slavery, for instance, I think an argument that a lot of white people will make, who, as we know from the statistics are overwhelmingly against reparations, is that, "Well, my ancestors didn't own slaves. And so why should I pay for reparations?" So in my own family history, for instance, on both sides, my family members immigrated from Scandinavia and they settled in the Midwest, and like, I think the earliest was mid 1800s or something. And so they were living in the US still at the time of slavery, but they were all in the North, none of them owned slaves, and then they moved to California. Even though my ancestors didn't own slaves, though, they still benefited in all kinds of ways from white privilege. So, you know, my ancestors were not discriminated against when they were trying to receive a home loan. Part of my family, when they moved to California, settled in Orange County, and Orange County had laws against Black folks living there. And so even though my family didn't own enslaved people, my family's ability to settle in Orange County and to accrue intergenerational wealth, which led to educational opportunities, which led to career opportunities, is still built upon the backs of enslaved folks in the US. And I think you could say the same thing, even for white people who are maybe only first-generation American, although it would look a little bit different than my family's history of privilege.

David: 15:37

No, I think that's right. And one of the things that this makes me think of is the fact that we typically operate with individualist notions of responsibility, where in order for us to recognize that we owe somebody something, we seem to believe that we need to establish a one-to-one correspondence between the perpetrator of an unjust action and the individual victim of that action. So it's almost as if we need clear cut mapping rules of guilt and victimhood in order for us to recognize responsibility, and something that a number of philosophers, especially in the 20th century, have contested is precisely the idea that responsibility is purely individual, and so talk about collective responsibility has emerged.

Ellie: 16:22

Yeah. And I think in addition to focusing on the way that this responsibility is shared, arguments about collective responsibility also need to focus on the temporal dimension of them, right? The fact that collective responsibility stretches between generations rather than just being something, even among a group, that exists in the present.

David: 16:42

And so one of the ways in which I think about this temporal dimension is to say, "Well, if you agree that people can inherit wealth, right? If you're entitled to inherit the wealth that your grandparents passed to your parents, and your parents passed on to you, why shouldn't you also inherit their debts, the responsibility for their crimes."

Ellie: 17:03

Yeah. And I think that really terrifies a lot of white folks in the US, right. Especially those who may have benefited very explicitly from enslavement, like the descendants of slave owners. In an argument against reparations, David Frum has this image where he imagines like, "Oh, just sending out a bill to a bunch of the descendants of slave owners." And I think that idea of some sort of like payday or reckoning is just beyond the pale for a lot of white Americans.

David: 17:32

Yes. And so I think that there is often this pragmatic panic, this panic around the pragmatics of reparations. Like, how are you going to do this? Who's going to pay for it? Are you going to send me an individual bill? And I have to pay money to an individual family that I've never met before. And they seem like intentionally reductive objections to what is a much more complicated issue as a way of distracting from the need to talk about the moral normative, uh, political dimensions of, you know, whether maybe this is a real entitlement? Is this something that we ought to do on moral and political grounds even if we agree that in practice, it might be a little tricky, although not impossible?

Ellie: 18:11

Absolutely. And I mean, maybe just like a bunch of the nice Christian, suburban white ladies who sponsor Black and Brown children and then post pictures of them on their refrigerators might have something to say about that. They're pro reparations, right?

David: 18:24

Yeah, that's the thing that I think a lot of white people are pro reparations, but only when they get to cloak them under the guise of benevolence, and charity, and philanthropy. It's reparations, but on my own terms.

Ellie: 18:37

Just out of the goodness of my heart. I pulled myself up by my own bootstraps, but I'm going to help others.

David: 18:43

Yeah. And of course usually like amounting to what? Uh, $2.99 a month. Today, we're speaking with Olufemi O. Taiwo about reparations. Dr. Taiwo is an expert in political philosophy and the philosophy of race who teaches at Georgetown University in DC. He has published on these topics in academic journals, as well as venues such as The Nation, Slate, and Al Jazeera. And he is currently working on a book entitled Reconsidering Reparations.

Ellie: 19:24

Basically, he's an incredible philosopher, who's also doing fantastic work in the realm of public philosophy. And we couldn't be more excited to have him join us today. Welcome, Femi.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 19:35

How's it going? Glad to be here.

David: 19:36

Thank you for joining us. Now, for a lot of people, when they hear the concept reparations, their mind immediately go to reparations for slavery, but you work on what are known as climate reparations, which are reparations associated with the uneven distribution of the impacts of global climate change. Can you lay out the basic idea for us?

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 19:59

Yeah. The setup of the question is interesting because I think you're right. There's a very different conversation amongst the people who use the term climate reparations and more long standing discussion about reparations for the transatlantic slave trade, and I just finished my book, Reconsidering Reparations.

Ellie: 20:19

Congratulations.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 20:22

Thank you. And the central idea of the book is that these two very different conversations about reparations are the same conversation. And more or less how I do that is by trying to develop a view of racial injustice on which we can tell a fairly continuous story about how it was that our current global political system was set up in a racially unjust way, and how it is that that setup is responsible for the deeply racially unjust vulnerabilities that are going to characterize the climate crisis going forward.

David: 21:00

So let me ask you about that, because if there's a connection forward, then presumably there is also a connection backwards. Is it the argument that slavery reparations and climate reparations have to happen at the same time, or is it that reparations for climate by their very nature are also reparations for slavery?

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 21:20

I think the answer is pretty close to the last option that you presented there. Basically, environmental vulnerability, so not just how likely you are to experience negative events like hurricanes and flooding, but what happens to you as a result of that? How many resources do you have access to to rebuild your life in response to these events? Where is the housing constructed that is disproportionately vulnerable to these events, right? Um, how are social resources mobilized to provide disaster response based on seeing you as a sympathetic figure, for example? Or in the other direction, how are resources of violence mobilized to police you even in the aftermath of climate related events? And if we look at the answer to all of those questions, they tell a deep story about how things that we think of as weather events, things that we think of as calamities that are primarily ecological, what the rain is doing, what the wind is doing, are actually powerfully shaped by the regular aspects of our social system. Overwhelmingly, our social systems act to protect the people at the top of the various relevant hierarchies, and the history of those hierarchies is that they're co-constructed, and co-constructed by what? Well, let me tell you a story about the transatlantic slave trade. And let me tell you a story about colonialism, right. You know, so it comes full circle.

Ellie: 22:52

Yeah. And so it sounds like, you know, you're giving us a way of thinking about not only how the transatlantic slave trade has impacted things like environmental racism in the US but also thinking about reparations in Africa itself, as interwoven with the aftermath of the transatlantic slave trade. For instance, I'm thinking about an article you wrote where you talk about how Africa as a continent has emitted only 3% of the world's cumulative carbon output, and yet Africa is also the continent that's seen some of the earliest and most extreme forms of weather patterns changing due to climate change.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 23:27

Yeah, that's right. And I would sit that fact about Africa's role in cumulative emissions next to another fact, which is, among the ways that we have of responding to past emissions, is a category of climate action called carbon removal or sometimes called negative emissions technologies. So it's about land management and aforestation, reforestation. And 75% of land set aside for this global challenge to meet our carbon removal targets is on the African continent, right? Africa's contributed almost nothing to the problem, but is taking up the lion's share of solutions, right? So these are very perverse distributions and benefits and burdens.

Ellie: 24:14

And who is deciding that it's Africa who's going to take on the lion's share of these burdens of forestation and other climate reparations.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 24:22

That's an important question in a lot of ways, because there are important multinational institutions, right? But I'm a storytelling kind of guy. Let me tell you a story about how we got these institutions, right.

David: 24:40

Hah.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 24:41

And it's a story that's going to talk about the transatlantic slave trade, it's going to talk about colonialism, right?

Ellie: 24:47

So even when leaders in Africa are part of these conversations, the idea is that there might be some sort of consent to exploitation ,or consent to coercion, that's going on on a deep level?

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 24:58

Yeah, I think that's right. And you know, I don't want to make it sound as though African leaders and African politicians aren't thinking in intelligent ways and thinking in strategic ways about how to make these decisions. But the intelligence that they're bringing to bear on their strategic situation is looking at their negotiating position, right? And these are countries that aren't at the top of the geopolitical pecking order. They're not countries that have immense amounts of government revenue to spare researching alternatives or funding think tanks and figuring out political solutions to a crisis where people are thinking on timescales through to the end of the century, right. It's not always a great fit for governments of countries that have very pressing short-term issues.

David: 25:49

Yeah. And when developed countries, or institutions from the global North, step in offer resources for the global South for fighting this crisis, a lot of times, this help comes with strings attached, right? And so the idea is, "Hey, developing countries, we'll give you money to enact environmentally friendly policies to solve the problem that we created. But in order to guarantee that you'll pay us back, you agree to Structural Readjustment Policies," cutting down things like social welfare programs, and to privatize things that maybe otherwise would have been national. And so there is a sense in which even environmental projects push for a neo-colonial program whereby the original imbalance is only amplified.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 26:36

Yeah, I think the use of the word neo-colonial is an important one, because what we're talking about, ultimately, isn't just whether or not the content of the political decisions is fair, but we're also talking about who's even in a position to make them. Countries further down the geopolitical totem pole, if you will, have less leverage, and, you know, when major countries like the United States threatened to take their ball and go home, right, what's Botswana gonna do?

David: 27:05

Right.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 27:06

Right? That's at the bottom of this.

Ellie: 27:11

Also, Femi, as someone who doesn't work quite in this philosophical space, I'm not sure if developed and developing countries is current. How would you feel about that terminology? Or should I be using a different terminology? David, you mentioned that, and I'm like, "It has like a Hegel vibes to me, which I-"

David: 27:27

I think we should just move to spirited and unspirited countries.

Ellie: 27:32

My God.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 27:34

Maximum Geist, moderate Geist.

Ellie: 27:39

Buried dice. No, but for real.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 27:43

Mean, the newer parlance is by income strata.

Ellie: 27:46

Yeah.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 27:47

The more- thing.

Ellie: 27:48

And poor countries.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 27:49

Yeah, low income, low middle income, middle income, income. But I'm bringing first world and third world back. I'm still there. I don't give a fuck. That's- that's what it should be.

Ellie: 28:04

Okay. Well, that's- that is very helpful

David: 28:10

Well, and I would like you to talk to us about a couple of the things that on your view, first world wealthy countries are morally obliged to do as a form of reparation for this climate related harm.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 28:23

Yeah. I mean, I could talk to you all day about what first-world nations should do. Um, first world nations, especially the United States, are interventionists and that's part of the problem. You know, we talk about bringing freedom to other places, right. And the basic framework of American exceptionalism is more or less a cultural consensus in this country. So while there are things that wealthy nations, the US included, should do, we have to do it in avoidance of that kind of political relationship, right. Because that itself is a form of colonial presence on the world stage. Where I think we should focus is on doing the things in wealthy nations that gives space for the rest of the world to do what it needs to do. So I think that means setting aggressive emissions reduction targets first and foremost in wealthy nations. That will have the effect of freeing up more of the carbon budget for the rest of the world to provide the residents of other places with what they need. I think they need to get back to the drawing board and refashion a global system of movement that is premised on resettlement. That used to be the going political structure during the Cold War, when many of the world's refugees were European, and as the racial composition of refugees shifted over the decades, there has been a gradual shift towards warehousing as a default mode of relation to people who are displaced across borders.

Ellie: 30:07

And can you briefly say what warehousing means?

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 30:11

Warehousing refers to a family of strategies by which developed nations keep people who are trying to move across borders in semi-permanent, I mean essentially warehouses, but stores them. Exactly. Right. Makeshift, temporary living situations that people end up living in for years and years. And I think that is unconscionable. And I think the implications of that, when we start to consider the scale of displacement that climate crisis on our current trajectory is likely to trigger, the implications of that are genocidal.

Ellie: 30:52

So one key aspect of climate reparations then is wealthier countries accepting more climate refugees, and actually giving them viable living conditions for the longterm, rather than warehousing.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 31:06

That's right.

David: 31:06

Yeah. And I haven't seen a lot of discussion of warehousing in the United States, at least in the mainstream media, but I know it is a hot topic, for example, in Europe, because one of the things that warehousing does is that it not only locks refugee communities into this state of impermanence for long periods of time, where they can be moved from one place to another, usually in these makeshift operations that are in the outskirts of town, but they are really controlled and calculated policies designed to prevent refugees from literally entering the community, to keep them in this spectral, this liminal space where we know they're there, but we don't know who they are or what they look like, so these states of exception almost, that become then definitive of the refugee experience.

Ellie: 31:54

Yeah, and I think it's very obvious from the way that we're talking about it, that in your work, Femi, you focus not just on reparations as a one-time transfer of cash, but as a broader set of long-term solutions to a lot of the issues that are plaguing us as nations, as groups, as individuals. What do you think about the idea of reparations on a more individual level through something like mutual aid? The idea that I, as a white person who has a good deal of class privilege, might directly give payment to somebody who comes from a more disadvantaged socioeconomic and/or racial background.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 32:29

I will be submitting my Cashapp as soon as we finish.

Ellie: 32:36

I see that quite a lot on social media, right. There- there are a lot of Black advocates for racial justice, who post their cash app on social media.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 32:44

Yeah. What do I think of this? Okay. What I think of individual level reparations is well spelled out by what I think about reparations in general. What is reparations supposed to accomplish, right? There was a point in the history of anti-imperial and anti-racist activism, which is the same period I referenced earlier, the forties, fifties, sixties, and seventies, these- this wave of anti-colonial movements, where they were trying to throw out the literal colonizers. They were trying to get the British Empire out, the Portuguese Empire out, but they weren't just trying to do that. Um, a lot of the political leaders and active people at this time were speaking along the same lines that I am now, in very literal terms about reconstructing the world. We need new multinational institutions because the multinational institutions we have now were produced by the same people and for the same reasons that our colonial domination is produced. Apartheid comes from the same place that these huge wealth inequities come from. And so if we want to relate to other people as neighbors and coworkers and supporters on terms of non-domination, as opposed to the domination embedded into the world system by colonialism, then we need a different world entirely. That's what racial justice demands. And so, Ellie, if you think you can get that world by Cashapp-ing me $50, go ahead, right. I will happily buy myself dinner tomorrow and toast the activists who fought for this perspective.

Ellie: 34:35

No, for real, I think, it sounds like, Femi, that you're skeptical, and rightly so, of individual solutions to collective problems. And one thing that you've mentioned here, as well as in your written work, is how capitalism is part of this same colonial structure. And so there has to be a sort of comprehensive political, economic, and social approach to reparations. I'm thinking here about an article that you wrote for Spectre recently called "What's New About Woke Racial CapitalismAnd What Isn't," and you talk in this article about woke-washing, how all these corporations basically joined the bandwagon of efforts for racial justice starting in June 2020 with the murder of George Floyd. They're like, "Oh, we're, you know, all for racial justice." These corporations were jumping on the bandwagon of woke-washing by talking pretty superficially about their commitments to racial justice. And for you, you know, even if these corporations' efforts aren't just all talk, but they actually have to do, for instance, with hiring more BIPOC employees and/or putting some of their money to different organizations, that this is never going to be enough because the whole point is that capitalism is at the root of the problem. So what is racial capitalism and how does it connect to this question of reparations?

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 35:52

Racial capitalism is a perspective on the history of the last five centuries or so of human, economic, and political interaction. The basic tenants of the position were developed in a bunch of places. There were radicals in East Africa and South Africa, um, the country South Africa, and the region East Africa, um.

David: 36:19

Sure.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 36:24

The particular strand of racial capitalism that I think about was popularized by Cedric Robinson and picked up on ways of telling world history, global history, that had been developed by people like Oliver Cox and Eric Williams, both of whom were Caribbean thinkers, Cedric Robinson is African-American. But basically what all these people are doing are trying to say, "What's the connection between the way that we produce things, and the way that society is organized more generally." And the story more or less is that what was spread by the cycles of conquest and colonial domination started by the European voyages of 1492 and thereabouts was a total system of social organization. It wasn't just some economic linkages or trade linkages. So the transatlantic slave trade and this broader system of colonialism started the Industrial Revolution. The world system built out of this whole period of human history comprehensively organized society in ways that were racially stratified. It's interesting that this way of thinking is so controversial now, given that the connection of racial stratification to these colonial conquests, just decades ago, in the 20th century, would have been unmistakable. A lot of these empires ran just very- the most explicitly racially apartheid regimes that you can think to devise. In Southern Rhodesia, for instance, there were rules of racial etiquette around which race of people could wear hats in the presence of the other, right. And- and we're not even talking about the much deeper racial divisions, right? Um, and colonial Kenya, they had strata pay that were explicitly racialized. The highest paid Black workers made less than the lowest paid Asian workers who made less than the lowest paid white workers there, which is very explicit racial divisions in economic life. And so until very recently in human history, the connection between race and capitalism was written down. Now we pretend it's so mysterious, but it's not at all. Okay.

David: 38:47

Hmm.

Ellie: 38:47

I'm at least encouraged by the fact that I think there's a huge growing contingent of young people who are really aware of this. I notice that with my students, for instance, but I think you're also right to point out that there's been like quite a collective forgetting, especially in the US.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 39:01

Yeah, a collective forgetting, a very motivated obfuscation of things. And motivated in odd ways, you know. Even people who work on race sometimes resist this because they think that it's failing to take race seriously if we acknowledge that there was a strong economic component to how it worked, right. But being enslaved was a very economic proposition. It literally meant you couldn't sell your labor and someone else owned it. It meant that you could serve as collateral to stabilize their loans, right. As 272 people did for Georgetown, where I work. Um, when Georgetown got into financial trouble, they liquidated their assets, which meant selling people. Um, this was a very explicitly economic relationship. And the point of racial capitalism is to show how social life in general, and not just production, was effected by these racial stratifications, but they were shot through with these considerations. It's just true.

David: 40:05

So, Femi, in your writings about reparations and climate change, you make the argument that one of the dangers of not taking a proactive approach to climate reform is that we're likely to see the spread of what Naomi Klein has called Eco-fascism. So can you talk to us about what this concept means and how it connects to the global refugee crisis?

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 40:26

Yeah, Eco-fascism is one of these contestant terms because it takes the term we've been banding about in US discourse for the last four years, fascism, and takes in some ways, an equally contentious term, eco, and puts them together. The thing that matters is that there are violent right wing elements who want to, in a variety of ways, pursue policies that will lead to death and destruction for people in the third world or Global South or whatever euphemism you like. Um, they will do so by means of border militarization, border violence, they will do so by means of warehousing, they will do so by means of conflict over resources. And these people have a better shot in a world where we fail to mitigate as fast as we need to, adapt as fast as we need to, remove carbon as fast as we need to. And that looks like the trajectory of the last few decades of politics.

David: 41:27

Well, and it's interesting that with Eco-fascism, what we see is almost a coming full circle of environmentalism, which is sometimes associated in the popular imagination with the progressive left, coming all the way over to the right and uniting with some of the more fascist-friendly corners of a different end of the political spectrum. And this, interestingly enough, is nothing new. So in your work, you also talk about the long and troubling history, within the environmentalist movement, of right wing tendencies and racism on environmental grounds.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 42:02

Yeah, that's right. Nowadays we associate conservationist and environmentalist with people who are left of center. We imagine a long-haired person with colorful clothing, hugging a tree, soy, some shit like that, right.

Ellie: 42:19

Okay.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 42:19

You know, the most important thing people need to realize about conservationist movements is that these are political struggles about what to do with land, about what to do with natural resources. And just sit that thought next to the standard boiler plate definitions of colonialism, right? Someone arrives from somewhere else, feeling entitled to the land and resources, maybe plants a flag down, says this belongs to the queen now, and we're off to the races, right? So conservationists, environmental justice movements, can be politically useful, but what's going to decide whether they are forces of climate colonialism or forces of justice are the political relationships they develop with the people who are affected by the decisions that they make and what they decide to value. Um, there's a researcher named Mordecai Ogata who chronicles how in the present, first world based organizations in the name of conservation are trampling over the rights of people in third world, Global South. And so, there's an effort to describe climate politics as environmentalist versus fossil fuel organizations. And to conveniently forget the wider backdrop of colonial injustice that is the starting point of planetary politics as such. And from that vantage point, it's a lot less clear whether the first world environmentalist or the first world fossil fuel companies is the good guy or the bad guy. And I think we have to get out of these good and evil frameworks and just start asking direct questions about what happens to people if we do this versus what happens to people if we make some other decision. And that's how we have to move forward.

Ellie: 44:16

Speaking of looking toward the future, you point out that reparations can facilitate comprehensive social transformation, following the work of Robin D.G. Kelley. What do you mean by this? Like how is it that reparations can go beyond changing the economic conditions of disenfranchised people and actually create such comprehensive social transformation?

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 44:40

I want to return to the anti-colonial activists of the sixties and seventies. I want to return to how literally they meant what political theorist Adom Getachew describes as worldmaking. They wanted to make the world over again. So they- they actually made progress on that front. There was a time, very recently, where much of the world, especially the African continent, was described on a map in terms of which European power laid claim to that territory, right. So there's a key at the bottom left corner listing the empires: United States, Great Britain, France, Portugal, Spain, Netherlands, Italy, and assigning colors to them. And those colors are much of the African continent. And, at least at that level, they literally did remake the world. And I think our task is no less comprehensive than theirs was. I think we're going to have to create institutions that don't exist. In their case, it was countries in our case, it may be something else. I think we're going to have to renegotiate the social role, levels of power, and decision-making processes of institutions that do exist. That might mean our going slate of multinational institutions, the World Bank, the IMF, World Trade Organization. Some institutions are going to have to cease to exist. Throw ExxonMobil back into the fires of Mordor, right. You know, that's what we're talking about. It's less that reparations is some specific policy thing that we can do that will then go on to result in social transformation. It's that reparations is the social transformation, right? We're talking about a sized slate of politics. We have to win if we want continue living on this Earth in anything that looks like it could even resemble justice.

Ellie: 46:57

Just a casual, small project.

David: 47:00

Well I was thinking, yeah, I was going to say, it sounds like a tall order, but then when you compare it to the alternative. it

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 47:07

Right.

David: 47:07

It doesn't even seem as if there are alternatives, right. Compared to extinction from global climate change, everything else pales in comparison.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 47:15

Yeah, our alternatives are extinction and Eco-fascism.

Ellie: 47:21

Eco-fascism probably would only last for a small amount of time, anyway. Unless Jeff Bezos like finds a way to get us all, you know, and by us all. I mean, a small select group of people.

David: 47:32

And that's the thing about the Eco-fascists who are like, "Only a few will live after climate change." I'm like, I don't want to be part of that group because I know who that's going to be, like that doesn't seem like a meaningful existence to me.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 47:45

And it all starts, Ellie, by sending me 50 bucks on Cashapp-

Ellie: 47:49

Well-

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 47:50

where I want to close this discussion.

Ellie: 47:52

On that note, Femi, you got it. I won't share oh- was- should we share your Venmo info with everybody or should we do it? Thank you so much for joining us today. It's been so good talking to you.

Olufemi O. Taiwo: 48:06

Thank you. Thanks having me.

Ellie: 48:15

David, how great was that?

David: 48:17

It was so good. I really love the way in which we are now connecting reparations to things like climate change, which again is not the way in which I think, or I think most Americans think about reparations.

Ellie: 48:28

Yeah. I mean, I think one of the benefits of Femi's analysis is his ability to just really show how things are all interconnected, which of course is overwhelming to a certain extent, but also so necessary cause I think he really drew attention to the way that colonialism is implicated in the realities of climate change, the changes that have already occurred, but also the changes that are going to happen in the future. Thinking here about teenager Greta Thunberg's famous statement, "How dare you?" This idea that those of us who are still alive and are older generations should feel ashamed and chastened by the climate reality that will affect her generation more than it will affect ours. And it will affect future generations even further. Of course, at the same time, Greta Thunberg is this young Swedish girl who was given an international platform. Think about all of the "How dare you"'s of the international climate refugees, who are mostly Black and Brown folks who are really bearing the brunt of this, even more than those in wealthy Scandinavian countries.

David: 49:33

Yes. And one of the things that we now know from experts in the social and legal and political impacts of climate change is that the world's poorest are the ones who are going to suffer the most from climate change, either because they live in countries that depend primarily on agriculture, or simply because of the well known connection between climate change and poverty. So that if you're poor, you're going to suffer from climate change effects much more intensely and become poorer as a result.

Ellie: 50:00

Yeah. And among so many possible reasons for that, that we could cite, one is the inability of poor folks to move to places that are less affected by climate change. And so, you know, if you live in Southern California and you have wildfire damage, but you're wealthy, you could move somewhere, a different state say, that is going to be less effected by climate change than Southern California is.

David: 50:21

And sometimes that movement is as literal as the power of your passport, right? The ability to leave your country and enter another country in search of a better life, because what Femi is drawing our attention to is the fact that even those people from the world's poorest countries or most effected countries who do move then face an uncertain future in Europe or in the United States as refugees who are not allowed to actually integrate into society.

Ellie: 50:50

Yeah.

David: 50:50

Now, as we close, one thing that I want to mention is that Femi's work on the connection between reparations and climate change is particularly important because it really expands the horizons of our imagination about what racial justice demands, in particular because as we've mentioned before, when we think about reparations, we really think about direct payments to descendants of formerly enslaved people. But in his work, he talks about a different kind of reparation. And here I want to mention the work of the legal theorist Lisa Laplante, who argues that even though a lot of people raise all kinds of objections to reparations, like, "Oh, they don't seem very workable. They don't seem very practical. They don't seem easily implementable. They don't seem easy to enforce." She says reparations are a matter of justice. And in fact, any time that you are having a discussion about justice, you are already having a discussion about reparations because that's what justice does, is it tries to repair a harm committed. And typically we think of that again on an individual level. And we think of the repair primarily in terms of punishment and maybe that's the way in which a reparation can happen, by punishing a guilty party, but she says with reparations in the more technical sense, we come to appreciate the importance of different approaches to justice, where yes, sometimes you punish the person who did a criminal deed, but sometimes you actually have to change your perspective and think about the community, where you're not trying to make an individual whole, you're trying to make an entire community whole or an entire community's relationship to its own past whole.

Ellie: 52:36

Yeah. And the way you put it, David ,reminds me of restorative justice and I think, you know, some really have made connections between reparations and restorative justice as a practice of not sort of doling out punishment, but actually working to repair the harms of the community by sharing grievances and having a kind of constructive community conversation about them.

David: 52:57

Yeah. And that's exactly what Laplante says. She defends what she calls a continuum theory of justice, where she says all these competing theories of justice that we have, some of which are more punitive, some of which are more restorative, some of which have a focus on economic and social development, she says they all converge around the concept of reparations. And so anybody who is committed to justice must be committed to finding the right way of repairing the right harm. And that requires in some cases, again, the more technical definition of reparations that we've been discussing, whether those be reparations for slavery or reparations for climate change.

Ellie: 53:40

Wow. So it sounds like according to her view, the question of whether you are for or against reparations is kind of a silly one, because it's like asking, "Are you for or against justice?" You might have disagreements on what constitutes justice or reparations, but if you're pro-justice, you should be reparations, at least in some form.

David: 53:58

Right. For her, justice is reparation and reparation is justice.

Ellie: 54:05

We hope you enjoyed today's episode. Please rate and review us on Apple podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen to your podcasts.

David: 54:13

You can email us with questions, feedback, or even requests for life advice at dearoverthink@gmail.com.

Ellie: 54:21

You can also find us on Instagram and Twitter at @overthink_pod. We want to thank Anna Koppelman, our production assistant, Samuel P.K. Smith for the original music, and Trevor Ames for our logo.

David: 54:35

Thanks so much for joining us today.