Reparations and climate change might at first glance seem unrelated. My guest Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò argues that they are inextricably linked, and that racial justice cannot happen without climate justice.

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Show Notes and Transcription:

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[music: Blue Dot Sessions, Single Still]

Christiane Wisehart, host and producer: I’m Christiane Wisehart and this is Examining Ethics, brought to you by The Janet Prindle Institute for Ethics at DePauw University.

Reparations and climate change might at first glance seem unrelated. My guest Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò argues that they are inextricably linked, and that racial justice cannot happen without climate justice.  

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, guest: So the question that you have to ask is, is a world that is 2, 3, 4, 5 degrees Celsius warmer than this one, a good foundation for racial justice? Is that going to provoke the kinds of political responses from the powers that be, the kinds of material situations of desertification and sea level rise and hurricanes? Is that a set of scenarios under which we think we can even protect the racial justice wins we’ve already got, much less win more?

Christiane: Stay tuned for our discussion on today’s episode of Examining Ethics.

[music fades out]

Christiane: Slavery caused a racial wealth gap that exists to this day in America. According to the Brookings Institution, “Black Americans are the only group that has not received reparations for state-sanctioned racial discrimination while slavery afforded some white families the ability to accrue tremendous wealth.” In their Brookings policy brief on the issue of reparations, Rashawn Ray and Andre Perry argue that the United States government owes a debt to descendants of enslaved people and descendants of Black Americans who faced racial discrimination. They outline several forms of repayment, including free college tuition, down payments for housing and business grants.

My guest today, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, makes a much more expansive and philosophical case for reparations. In his book Reconsidering Reparations, he outlines the connections between colonialism, climate change and racial oppression. He makes a powerful argument for reparations centered around climate justice.

[interview begins]

Christiane: So, there are a lot of different ways to define reparations, and I want to know, first of all, just briefly, how do you define the term? 

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò: In the book I go for a view of reparations that I call the constructive view. And on the constructive view, reparations is the just distribution of the costs of moving us from this unjust world to the just one.

Christiane: What are some of the problems that you’ve identified with some of the common arguments for reparations?

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò: So, I group the common arguments for reparations into two families, basically. One is the harm-repair view of reparations. So, on the harm-repair view, reparations is supposed to just make a material difference to the lives of the people receiving reparations. So, the target population might be different. It might be the population of the Caribbean. It might be the population of the African continent. It might be African-American descendants of the enslaved. It might be first nations in Canada. But whoever the group is, the point of reparations is to move them from some standard of living or welfare to a higher one.

And then on the second view of reparations, that I call the relationship-repair view, the point is to change the relationships between the group of people receiving reparations and some other group, maybe the political institutions of a country, or a set of countries, maybe their neighbors who are non-black and non-indigenous, perhaps, but improve some set of social relationships. And both of those are responding to what they see as problems in the present that are connected to, or maybe even constituted by, past harms and injustices. The focus is on looking backwards to find both the source of the problem and the thing that is supposed to be eliminated, whether it’s the source of today’s bad relationships or the source of today’s lowered amount of welfare or wealth. And I think, broadly, both of those in the particular case of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism, I think really undersell what trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism were.

They certainly include important events of atrocities and injustices, but it wasn’t as though they just caused problems in the past that are with us today. The events of trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism literally built the world. They are the events that constructed the global political and economic system that we have now, and that explain some of its most basic and fundamental characteristics. And so what I’m trying to go for in the constructive use to acknowledge both that levels of welfare in populations and social relationships have been adversely affected, or I should say constituted by that world political system, but we also need to fix the world political system itself.

Christiane: You’ve already mentioned a little bit about what it means to have a constructive view of reparations, but what does the constructive part of that mean?

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò: One of the concepts I talk about a lot in the book comes from Adom Getachew’s work, Worldmaking after Empire that was talking about the political contributions of a wave of activists who were acting in the post-second-World-War world. And as she characterizes them, they weren’t just bucking against this or that empire. There were hundreds of national independence movements fighting off Imperial domination, but they were also fighting to construct something, to build a new kind of political order across and within the economies of the world and the now newly-independent countries, those much of the global south, much of Asia and Africa. One in which different people in different parts of the world could work together and relate to each other and trade with each other on terms of solidarity and cooperation, rather than Imperial domination.

So, it wasn’t just a matter of fighting back a particular system of colonialism and apartheid, but it certainly had to include that. But it was also about building new structures, challenging the way that the UN functioned, building what they called a New International Economic Order, which would relate these countries to each other on what they thought to be more egalitarian terms. And we have that kind of struggle in our lifetimes, our generations.

We’re going to have to build a new energy system than the one that was built by this very same history and out of these very same economic and political connections. And that is going to be, in part, about dismantling a system that runs on fossil fuels, but is going to be in the very same strokes for the very same set of reasons, a set of putting something else in place that is likewise just as valuable. Is that system one that provides energy access and security for all? That’s compatible with housing security for all? That gives everyone basic material resources? Or is it one that exploits the many for the security of the few? The status quo is pushing us in the latter direction, but reparations and justice and reparations would push us towards the former.

Christiane: If somehow a listener has not been paying attention for the last 10 years or so, it’s easy for those of us in the United States to think, first of all, that reparations is just about slavery, just about fixing the problems that came up with slavery, or that reparations would just be about like writing a check or something. But the constructive view is basically saying, “No, it’s the whole world.” And then it’s also: righting those wrongs would require completely remaking the world. Am I getting that correctly?

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò: Yes.

Christiane: With those two things, I really appreciated your focus on cumul