---
author:
- Malcom Ferdinand
- Shela Sheikh
- Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
date: 2026-09-04
lang: en
rights: "CC BY-NC-SA 4.0,
  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/deed.fr"
source: "https://plurivers.net/revue-plurivers-1/reparations-and-climate-change.html"
subtitle: A conversation with Olufẹ́mi O. Táíwò
title: Reparations and Climate Change
---

::: biography
I am Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University in the
United States. I received my PhD in philosophy at the University of
California Los Angeles. Growing up in the Cincinnati suburbs of Ohio in
the USA in a mixed immigration status Nigerian-American family and
community, I was exposed to a range of cultural norms and ideas about
the world, be they urban working-class, suburban middle class, white,
African American or first-generation Black African. Studying philosophy,
in particular political philosophy, provided a means to think through
these different codes to navigate this problem---or challenge---of many
overlapping worlds. Some of my academic endeavors, in particular the
work talking about racial capitalism, have been an active way of trying
to think through how to fit into various intersecting worlds,
particularly within discursive and political traditions on the left
where there is dissensus regarding privileged points of departure, for
instance, class struggle, white supremacy, or anti-blackness.

My theoretical work draws liberally from the Black radical tradition,
anti-colonial thought, German transcendental philosophy, contemporary
philosophy of language, contemporary social science, and histories of
activism and activist thinkers. I am the author of *Elite Capture: How
the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)*
(Haymarket Books, 2022) and *Reconsidering Reparations* (Oxford
University Press, 2022). My public philosophy, including articles
exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been
featured in *The New Yorker*, *The Nation*, *Boston
Review*, *Dissent*, *The Appeal*, *Slate*, *Al Jazeera*, *The New
Republic*, *Aeon*, and *Foreign Policy*. I have published in academic
journals ranging from *Public Affairs Quarterly*, *One
Earth*, *Philosophical Papers*, and the American Philosophical
Association newsletter, *Philosophy and the Black Experience*. I am a
member of the editorial board of *Hammer and Hope*
([[https://hammerandhope.org]{.underline}](https://hammerandhope.org/)),
a new online magazine of Black politics and culture. See
<http://www.olufemiotaiwo.com>.
:::

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,[^1] or of CARICOM.[^2]

\_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.)[^3] 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[^4] 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.[^5] 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."[^6] In it you critiqued a facile interpretation of
"standpoint epistemology"[^7] 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,[^8] 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.[^9] 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.

[^1]: \[Eds.\] Prime Minister of Barbados, Mottley has repeatedly called
    for reparations and stressed the link between slavery and climate
    change.

[^2]: \[Eds.\] 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/]{.underline}](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/]{.underline}](https://caricomreparations.org/caricom/caricoms-10-point-reparation-plan/)).

[^3]: \[Eds.\]
    [[https://www.ddesschool.com/]{.underline}](https://www.ddesschool.com/).

[^4]: \[Eds.\] 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). 

[^5]: \[Eds.\] Adom Getachew, *Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and
    Fall of Self-Determination* (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University
    Press, 2019).

[^6]: \[Eds.\] 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]{.underline}](https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/post/being-in-the-room-privilege-elite-capture-and-epistemic-deference).

[^7]: \[Eds.\] 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/>.

[^8]: \[Eds.\] Táíwò, Olúfẹ́mi O., *Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took
    Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else)* (New York: Haymarket
    Books, 2022).

[^9]: \[Eds.\] Regarding homonationalism and pinkwashing, see Jasbir K.
    Puar, *Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times*
    (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007).