The following is an edited version of an interview conducted in April 2023 via zoom by editorial team members Malcom Ferdinand and Shela Sheikh. We have attempted to maintain the spoken tone and have added editorial references where deemed helpful.
_Malcom Ferdinand and Shela Sheikh (MF, SS): Thank you so much for agreeing to share some of your thoughts with us. Your work, specifically on reparations, has greatly inspired us. Could you explain why, according to your argument, reparations necessarily entail climate justice?
_Olúfémi O. Táíwò (OT): My understanding of climate justice comes from the particular view I take on reparations. Some views of reparations think that you should just be trying to make the lives of the recipients of reparations better off in response to the harms of racism that give rise to the call for reparations in the first place. We just need to compare the welfare of, say, Martinicans or Haitians or African Americans after they receive reparations versus before; welfare here is often understood in terms of specific kinds of goods, income, the number of acres of land that they own. And those are the sorts of things that we would look to figure out whether or not reparations were successful.
There’s a second group of people for whom the point of reparations is more spiritually or interpersonally reparative. Maybe the goal of reparations should be a kind of reconciliation, or a new kind of relationship based on trust. This is often a view of reparations that comes from people living in multi-racial societies: South Africa, the US, the UK. Their view is that reparations will repair a trust relationship between an offending government and the people who were harmed by that government or its predecessor. It will make a healthy relationship possible between those parties, or maybe between white citizens and black citizens.
I think there’s a lot that these two understandings of reparations get right, but the view I prefer is a third one. I call it a constructive view. Part of this is a perspective on the history of racial injustice around the slave trade and the pre-history of capitalism. These particular atrocities built the world that we live in, its political and economic systems. That’s not true of every conceivable atrocity. But I think there’s good reason to think it’s true for the particular stages of colonial accumulation that were catalyzed by this. It makes sense to have a view of reparations where we respond to that scale of injustice, or failure of justice. We should be thinking about putting together the world system in a different way—as one that is based on justice and solidarity rather than domination.
So that’s the basic thought about reparations. The tie to climate crisis is distinct in my view of reparations, but I think it could be compatible with the other views of reparations as well, particularly the harm/repair, increase the welfare of the recipients with reparations way of thinking. Any view of reparations as trying to make a consequential difference in the world has to be concerned with what means might be efficacious for that end. What is going to get the job done? You might just want cash transfer, or just want technology transfer, or just want land transfer. If that’s the case, in order for that to be sufficient to raise Black people’s standard of living to a just level, I think the necessary practical view of those transfers is to think that they are going to be durable transfers of life chances in a world that’s getting hotter, in a world where there’s geopolitical fracturization, in a world where there’s danger of widespread systemic failures and the kinds of conflicts that are likely to arise in a world of widespread systemic failures. Essentially, to just take the jargon away for a second, you have to think white people won’t come and take this shit back once one starts fucking with their money. And I’m sorry, I just don’t believe that—that’s not the prediction I would make about how things are going to unfold over three generations. I think if you want durable changes to the living conditions of a huge percentage of humanity, to the political structure that decides the living conditions for a huge percentage of humanity, it will require cash transfers, don’t get me wrong. Start there, in fact, but people are going to need political decision-making structures that are meaningfully participatory so that corporations and banks, debt service and so forth, don’t take the money back tomorrow. It takes something like coalitions between states on the scale of the non-aligned movement to prevent military adventurism from the world’s great powers.
_MF, SS: In your book, Reconsidering Reparations, you
make a very powerful and beautiful statement by preceding each
chapter with a narration of the Malê Revolt, which took place in
Brazil in 1835. This for us brings to mind the revolts of the
Caribbean. Could you say something about your engagement with
demands for reparations from the Caribbean world? For example,
we’re thinking of the words and actions of Mia Mottley,[Eds.] Prime Minister of Barbados, Mottley has
repeatedly called for reparations and stressed the link between
slavery and climate change.
or of CARICOM.[Eds.] CARICOM, The Caribbean Community, is a
grouping of twenty countries, stretching from The Bahamas in the
North to Suriname and Guyana in South America (https://caricom.org/our-community/who-we-are/).
The CARICOM Reparations Commission, established in 2013, has
produced a 10-point reparation plan (https://caricomreparations.org/caricom/caricoms-10-point-reparation-plan/).
_OT: I would describe myself politically as Pan-Africanist. And
my perception is that, at least in the past 200 years, but
certainly in the past 40 years, the Caribbean is the most
politically advanced region of the Black world. I’m not from the
Caribbean, so I’m not saying that out of chauvinism. That is just
my opinion. Part of the reason that I have that opinion connects
with this specific issue of reparations. And I don’t just mean
that I like the text of the CARICOM plan, although that is, in and
of itself, something that I think is worth learning from. There’s
an emphasis on cash transfer. But there’s also an emphasis on
technology transfer, there’s an acknowledgment of the widespread
social harm of slavery and colonialism and the acknowledgment of
the widespread offensive that it would take to deal with the
historical consequences of that. And you don’t get the wrong kind
of fixation on dollars and cents that capitalism encourages.
There is a system that obviously measures resources that we can
use to make other kinds of changes, but the presence of dollars
will not, in and of itself, provide the political culture that’s
necessary to make good on what people want out of reparations, and
so I admire the comprehensiveness of that plan. And I think there
are other groups, besides CARICOM, even within the Caribbean, like
the Martinicans, there are groups here in the US who are also
thinking with that kind of broad vision. (I’m thinking for
instance of The Destination Design School of Agricultural Estates
in the Black Belt region in Alabama.)[Eds.] https://www.ddesschool.com/.
One of the things I like about the things that I’ve
read out of the Caribbean reparations movement is that kind of
broad vision. But I think another reason why I’m thinking about
what’s going on in the Caribbean in particular is the global scale
and the kind of explicit geopolitics that you get out of Caribbean
claims for reparations, whether it’s those like Beckles[Eds.] Hilary McD. Beckles, How Britain
Underdeveloped the Caribbean: A Reparation Response to Europe’s
Legacy of Plunder and Poverty (Kingston: University of the
West Indies Press, 2021).
and scholars targeting the British Empire, whether
it’s the Haitians or the Martinicans targeting the French Empire.
I don’t mean that it’s only happening in the Caribbean, but I
think because of the nature of the history of the Caribbean,
there’s a tendency towards thinking about the role of states in
the international system and a thinking of reparations that could
have a state-to-state dimension, an inter-state level of advocacy.
And I think that scale is clarifying regarding what the targets
should be for reparations: this should certainly include states,
but we should also start targeting multinational corporations, and
certain banks.
Regarding political leaders like Mottley, I don’t mean to say that everything Mottley has ever said or done is correct. I know Mottley has her critics on the Caribbean left. And there’s going to be apt criticisms of state leaders because the state system is something that is premised on domination and I don’t think it’s even possible to maintain state sovereignty without defending and extending state authority via coercive means—at least, not the way things stand right now. But I see Mottley as someone who has an appropriately practical view of the scale of cash transfer and capital transfer and technology transfer that she’s trying to achieve, and what sorts of institutions she needs to put pressure on to do it. She’s putting pressure on the multinational organizations like the IMF, she’s trying to put pressure on the bigger nations, like the bigger member states of the EU, like France, to get some movement in the international arena. And people may have their criticisms of that strategy. But the criticisms I would be more interested in are of the tactical kind. The criticisms I’m uninterested in are the moralistic sort. Of course, we can always say the institutions she’s working in and with are corrupt. And that is, of course, true. That is a bland description of what every one of us does, every day. We’re not living in the age of Cold War geopolitics, where there are a lot of states that are both vocally dissenting from the neoliberal consensus and are interventionist about it. Whatever the Chinese Communist Party thinks, they’re not sending militaries to liberate Angola like Cuba was. So that’s not the stage of world history we’re in. Nobody has a spare Soviet Union lying around and so you have to answer the practical question of what does it actually look like to work towards getting huge cash transfers so that the Guyanese economy is not a hurricane away from being half of itself. Those are practical questions that we can’t answer by citing Lenin. We have to answer those with objective plans and concrete, political tasks. And to me Mottley has advanced the discussion towards attempts to do that. And if people have better ideas, that’s fantastic. I would love to hear what those are. But for now, she’s what we have.
_MF, SS: From the perspective of the Pluriverse journal, which aims to foreground what we and others call “a decolonial ecology,” we would like to phrase the previous question the other way around: do you think that ecological or environmental justice would necessarily entail different forms of reparation, and if so, why? Can you give examples that have inspired you?
_OT: I certainly don’t think so as a conceptual matter. Obviously, you could just think about climate crises along the modes of what people have called carbon reductionism. On that view, climate politics boils down to asking: How do we electrify everything? How do we replace coal with geothermal? And there would be nothing awry at the level of basic intellectual coherence if that’s the way you looked at things. I think my point about reparations is a statement like: Here’s what you would be doing if you just focused on whether or not we use an energy mix that is 30% coal or 0% coal. As a matter of fact, there’s already climate change, we’ve already warmed the planet, we are seeing in the present tense droughts, wildfires, the warming of the ocean, rising sea levels. And there are winners and losers from those climate events. There are regions that are disproportionately vulnerable, there are regions that are disproportionately safe and secure.
And, unsurprisingly, those differences correlate fairly strongly with wealth. After all, resilience is something you can buy—not necessarily because you can decide whether or not there are floods, but because you can decide whether or not there are flood insurance programs if you can spare the cash to fund them. You can’t necessarily decide whether or not there is drought, and thus, problems in the local food supply. But you can decide whether or not there are subsidies to bring in food from the other side of the world when there are problems in the local food supply. When you look at the actual social determinants of climate vulnerability, they are fairly directly related to different standards of wealth and, literally in a geographic sense, where wealth has accumulated and to what degree it has accumulated.
So if all you do is try to make progress on the adoption of renewable energy and you let the chips fall where they may distributively in terms of the climate impacts, you will in effect be doing the opposite of reparations. The most straightforward predictions we can make about the distribution of death and disease and destruction from climate crisis—“this will burden the people who have been burdened already”—the thing that all the environmental justice people all around the world say day in and day out, it’s just true: Black, Brown, Indigenous people get the worst of it, despite having contributed the least to the emissions and the general problems of politics that got us into this mess. So if you have a genuine commitment to justice, if you want to actually create a just world in a practical sense, you want to do the activities that are required to build one and you don’t just want to use the word justice. What that practically requires of you is intervening to change the distribution of technology and the distribution of wealth that are going to be required to deal with the climate crisis. And, concretely, those different distributions that you would have to deal with would end up throwing technology and debt relief, and cash and capital, in the directions of the places that currently have the least of those in ways that are causally directly related to all of the things that built our current present order. Do you have a vision of justice that means that the people who have contributed least to the problem get some kind of social support from everyone else? If you have that view, you have a view that already practically entails reparations. Whether or not you like reading Fanon is really beside the point.
_MF, SS: In the work of the Observatoire Terre-Monde, we are concerned with rethinking our ways of inhabiting the Earth and of making the world, or worlds, in the face of global ecological crises. And our aim with this journal and our “pluriversal” approach is to contribute to a de-centering of the debate on ecology away from the Global North and, along with other initiatives, to foster global (including South–South) solidarities and networks of conversation. Does this, for you, resonate with your very powerful employment of the terms “worldmaking” and “worldmaking resistance” in your book, Reconsidering Reparations? Could you tell us about how you use these terms and the histories you are drawing from?
_OT: I’m borrowing the term “worldmaking” from a colleague of
mine, Adom Getachew. Her book, Worldmaking after Empire,
was in part an attempt to characterize the particular sphere of
Black international politics from the most active decades of
anti-colonial resistance, essentially from World War II to 1989,
with maybe an emphasis on the 60s and 70s.[Eds.] Adom Getachew, Worldmaking after
Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination (Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019).
She wasn’t thinking about reparations in the same
way that I was, but she was thinking about worldmaking in a way
that I learned a lot from and her depiction of [Kwame] Nkrumah and
Michael Manley and [Gamal Abdel] Nasser and all these figures is
that they’re literally trying to build a different world. From my
students’ perspective, it’s a little difficult for them to
understand, because they were born after this world was created.
They were born after the Cold War. I was even born days after the
Berlin Wall fell. So I have to impress upon them that there was a
time when there was this thing called the Cold War. They literally
said: there are three worlds. First, second, and third. It was
explicitly a political, economic, military, and ideological
struggle over what the shape of the world was going to be. The
dominant way of talking about that struggle is as a struggle
between the US and maybe to a much lesser degree, the allies of
the US, and then the USSR, and to a much lesser degree, the allies
of the USSR. But in fact, there were all sorts of positions about
what the world should have been like, way more than three.
Building the world or building a set of worlds, a world in which
many worlds can fit, accomplishing that at a literal planetary
scale, wasn’t just a kind of starry-eyed thing said by a
philosopher, it was a concrete political objective that people
were working in self-conscious ways to try to achieve. As in her
gloss on where the New International Economic Order fits into
third-world politics, as in her gloss on African-Asian solidarity
after the Bandung Conference, there are all these kinds of touch
points where people were trying to make a literal planetary-scale
social order. And after capitalism won the world war that the Cold
War was, that is a way of thinking that is not as popular as it
was during that time. So, part of what I took myself to be doing
in the reparations book, and I take myself to be doing in
everything, is saying: that was valuable, that scale of thinking,
that scale of practical objective. We’re learning the wrong lesson
if we think that capitalism won the Cold War because it was
better. Wars are won by guns and force, they’re not referenda on
what the world should be like, they are competitions between
people of different levels of strength and different levels of
resources. And that’s what determines who wins political contests.
But that doesn’t determine what outcomes we should want out of
political contests. Those outcomes that people wanted back in the
60s and 70s, they are the same ones we should want now for the
same reason.
_MF, SS: This issue of Pluriverse is on the theme of
“decolonizing climate change.” We’d like to tease out how this
might be interpreted from the perspective of your work. In 2020,
you published an important, much-cited article on the website
The Philosopher entitled “Being-in-the-Room Privilege:
Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference.”[Eds.] Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, “Being-in-the-Room
Privilege: Elite Capture and Epistemic Deference,” The
Philosopher, vol. 108, no. 4 (2020), https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/being-in-the-room-privilege-elite-capture-and-epistemic-deference.
In it you critiqued a facile interpretation of
“standpoint epistemology”[Eds.] As Táíwò notes in “Being-in-the-Room
Privilege,” the International Encyclopedia of Philosophy
summarizes feminist standpoint theory as: 1) Knowledge is socially
situated; 2) Marginalized people have some positional advantages
in gaining some forms of knowledge; 3) Research programs ought to
reflect these facts. See https://iep.utm.edu/fem-stan/.
and suggested the urgency of making structural and
systemic changes rather than simply inviting more spokespersons
from marginalized groups into otherwise elite conversations. In
other words, you argued that what needs changing is the social
system that marginalizes people in the first place. This is
something we within the Observatoire Terre-Monde would agree with
in the context of “a decolonial ecology”: who is invited into the
mainstream conversation about the climate crisis? And what are the
urgent broader questions that are often occluded by a politics of
representation? Could you elaborate on how the argument you made
in this article, as well as your Elite Capture book,[Eds.] Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O., Elite Capture: How
the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything
Else) (New York: Haymarket Books, 2022).
connects with your work on reparations and climate
justice? And what for you would be the most urgent structural
changes to be made when it comes to responding to climate
crises?
_OT: I’ve talked about the relationship between these two books
so much, but I feel like I have a difficult time relating it to
the specific ideological tools that states and corporations are
using to shore up climate politics as usual. And that’s in part
because there are so many different techniques that they use. But
a set of things that you do see from context to context are these
various kinds of “-washing.” People talk about greenwashing,
artwashing, pinkwashing in some cases, like homonationalism.[Eds.] Regarding homonationalism and pinkwashing,
see Jasbir K. Puar, Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in
Queer Times (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).
There’s all kinds of terms people use to describe
this thing. But they all just exploit the fact that you can show
people something other than what is going on. You can churn out
climate activists that look like us on whatever version of “us”
we’re working with, whether the “us” is based on gender, or
nationality, or race, or religion. They can churn out someone who
looks like you and then that person says what the people in charge
have been saying, or that person even vocally disagrees with what
the people in charge are saying, but they are offering you this
catharsis of hearing a criticism rather than actually changing the
practices that are inviting the criticism. So, the ability of this
stage of politics to absorb opposition to itself is pretty
unlimited. And the reason for it just goes back to what we were
talking about earlier: ideological problems, moral criticisms,
political criticisms of the status quo didn’t just have optical or
cosmetic implications during the Cold War. Those were potential
military vulnerabilities: if you were in the US and advocating for
communism, or if you were in the USSR and advocating for
capitalism, maybe that expression of dissent today becomes an
intelligence leak tomorrow. And these states responded
accordingly. Now that functionally capitalism has no
interventionist alternatives, now that there isn’t that same level
of struggle over what the terms are going to be of global
politics, all these forms of conversation, of discourse, are a lot
less daunting and a lot easier to co-opt by the powers that be,
and easier to just ignore. If you’re the kind of person that can
launch an intercontinental ballistic missile, how concerned are
you about what’s going on in academic journals? Maybe a little?
Probably not that concerned. You probably have bigger fish to fry,
as they say.
_MF, SS: True, although the perception of what’s going on in academia is maybe a bit different in France than in the US. I’m sure you heard about it, but every so often there is a public criticism of scholars who are engaging in decolonization, reparation, gender studies, resistance, and anti-racism. And yet France can still send an intercontinental missile. But there is this French idea of what France is that is related to French “honor.” And there’s also French Republicanism: if an academic speaks of “the decolonial” then they are often seen as separatist, disloyal to the state. But at least we’re not having critical race theory or gender studies banned in universities.
_OT: The examples that you were talking about are really interesting, and interestingly related: they’re good examples of the kind of thing that I was describing in the “Being-in-the-room” piece where we confuse the internal stakes of the dynamics of our movement for external political states. There are conversations amongst the climate marchers about whether the Black and Brown climate organizers should march in the front or the back. But either way, the state and corporations have effective techniques to nullify the content of what those Black and Brown climate marches are saying. If you put them at back then they will say, “Oh, the climate movement is for rich, affluent hippies.” If you put them at the front, then they will pay them or co-opt them or brandish them as irrational, or both. They’ll pay one consulting firm to pursue one strategy and one consulting firm to prove the other strategy; there’s no desire or need for coherence on their part. The only thing they need to make their strategies jive is not any moral principle but the rate of return on the portfolios that they’re defending. And whether Black and Brown climate marchers have been marching at the front or the back, we’re still burning coal, the amount of carbon emissions is still going up, the land that is being “conserved” to meet climate targets is still Maasai land or it’s still land where Indigenous people live. All concrete material distributions of who is profiting and who is being killed or burdened with either the climate crisis itself or with the particular path of energy transition that we’ve taken to supposedly fight the climate crisis—all those distributions are still, for the most part, going in the same directions as they were 20 years ago. There has been progress on things, particularly the adoption of solar [energy], that’s moving in a positive direction. There are at least some subsidies to electrify public transportation more quickly, the EU has been better about this than we have over here in the States. This is happening, so I don’t want to say there has been no progress. But there certainly hasn’t been the kind of progress that I think we are interested in, or that people deserve.
_MF, SS: In Reconsidering Reparations, you include a quotation from Harry Belafonte, who left us the day before yesterday, as an epigraph to the chapter, “What’s Next: Why Reparations Require Climate Justice.” In it he refers to a discussion he had with Martin Luther King, who said: “I guess we’re just going to have to become firemen.” We could put this in comparison with a very often talked about excerpt from a speech by Malcolm X, where he said there is a house burning, you have the house Negro, and the field Negro, and the field Negro says: “Well, let it burn.” If you put the two together, one might ask: looking specifically at the history of exclusion of Black and Brown and Indigenous people from discussions on climate justice, from NGOs, from positions of visibility, power, decision-making . . . how can one convince people who have been already disenfranchised? How can one say, “Okay, well, you should engage, you should act, you should be a fireman too”?
_OT: This really resonates with a lot of the conversations I’ve been having. I don’t get as much skepticism now in 2023 as when I started on this back in 2019. So even in that short amount of time, there’s been a change, but even now, still, people think, why should we care about this? This is someone else’s problem; this is someone else’s fault. And someone else should sort it out. We have other, more pressing problems to worry about. And the first thing I’m inclined to say is, I don’t even know if that’s false. If you’re in a community with low levels of healthcare, high levels of gun violence, if your utilities are shut off, I’m not going to say to that person: “Hey, you need to study, you need to actually drop those things and what you need to be focusing on is whether or not you have solar.” That’s just not my policy. I think there’s a version of this complaint that I agree with. I’ve never heard that juxtaposition of those two quotes before. I really liked that. The Malcolm X, you know, “the master’s house is burning; how do you feel about that?” versus Dr. King saying, “we have to become firemen”? I think one of the reasons I find that juxtaposition so interesting is because there is a level of politics where I think Malcolm [X] is describing the appropriate response. If we’re talking about US hegemony and centrality in the world system, I do think you’re making a kind of basic political mistake, at least if your politics is organized around Black liberation, if you’re mourning the loss of US hegemony. I don’t think I would disagree with that person who asks, what’s in it for Black people of the US if the US is at the center of things? But what’s different about climate crisis is that climate crisis isn’t affecting climate policymakers, or solely. The climate crisis, the broader ecological collapse, is a fact affecting the planet. It’s not Master’s house, you really do live here. And that’s the thing that I’ve been trying to impress upon people with the world-systems-level analysis, it is literally ecologically true that emissions in China, to the extent that they contribute to global warming, are materially affecting your reality elsewhere. It is not mediated through purely interpersonal relationships, it does not have to be the case that you have a personal relationship with somebody over there who’s deciding what the factories should emit into the air, for there to be a direct causal relationship between their activity and the circumstances of your life. I think the kind of anti-intellectualism that I’m pushing back against isn’t the objection to thinking about climate crisis from priorities. You may well have better priorities in your particular situation. That’s fine. But the idea that the only political systems you should worry about are ones that you have a personal relationship to, are ones that show up in recognizable ways in your personal relationship, I think, is just not compatible with having self-determination in a world that, in fact, has the kind of complexity that this has. And that’s another aspect of what I’m resisting, beyond the fetishization of trauma, in the essays where I’m resisting this kind of over focus on lived experience. Nobody experiences federal interest rates in the way that you experience being punched in the face. That’s not the kind of thing federal interest rates are. It is actually measurably true, however, that things that you do experience, like unemployment, like rises in levels of violence due to deteriorating social conditions, relate in ways that we can understand if we study and pay attention and think about things beyond our immediate experience, that relate in indirect ways to what interest rates are at banks. If you’re only privileging the sorts of things that people experience, what you are functionally doing is handing the reins of the conditions of possibility for people’s experience to the sorts of people who are going to in fact be making those decisions about what the rest of us are going to experience. If you trust the people at the Federal Reserve to decide for you what the level of unemployment in your community should be, then you should adopt the politics that leaves it to them. But if you don’t want that to be, if you want to have something like democratic control over the experiences of your life, you need to have in your trusted network, in your collective “we,” someone who pays attention to that. You don’t have to be the person studying interest rates, just like you don’t have to be the person who knows about plumbing, or the person who knows about medicine, but you should probably be willing to see a doctor. And I think that is true of climate crisis. And climate politics.
_MF, SS: Thank you for your time, Femi.
_OT: Thanks so much for doing this.