PORTSIDE CULTURE

FUTURE PERFECT  
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Natasha Lennard
June 1, 2022
Bookforum
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_ This "important intervention," writes reviewer Lennard, shows "that
reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism are a matter of
justice and also a necessary condition for rising to the existential
challenge of global heating." _

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Reconsidering Reparations
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780197508893

THE WORLDS CONJURED in analytic philosophy are strange ones, in which
abstract persons are trapped in a shifting kaleidoscope of
hypotheticals, posited obligations, infinite regressions, near and far
possible worlds. Even after the so-called applied turn in the last
century of ethics and political philosophy, the tendency by
professional thinkers to treat every real-world problem as a logic
puzzle persists. 

This approach has extended to analytic philosophers’ theorizing
about reparations for slavery. Some, like political philosopher
Bernard Boxill, have urged an approach situated in Lockean principles
of natural rights that assert “satisfaction” is due to any victim
of wrongdoing. The libertarian Robert Nozick famously argued for
reparations based on rectifying the unjust appropriation of
property. 

Broadly speaking, these accounts take up theories of justice based on
historical harms and attendant obligations. But the analytic
discipline as a whole has failed to treat calls for reparations, such
as those advanced by Black nationalists in the 1960s and ’70s, as an
urgent and liberatory demand to rebuild this (actual) world, ordered
as it has been by colonial conquest and the enslavement of Black
people. Meanwhile, under the influence of John Rawls’s “ideal
theory” of justice, liberal philosophers’ arguments for resource
distribution have been framed in terms of achieving a just and fair
future society, detached from questions of historic causes of current
inequality and injustice. 

It is on this crucial point—the necessity of dealing with global
realities and the processes behind them—that
philosopher Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò bases his illuminating
_Reconsidering Reparations_. Calling upon intellectual legacies far
beyond the analytic canon—from anticolonial activists to the Black
radical tradition to legal scholarship to lessons from the
nineteenth-century Malê slave rebellion in the Empire of
Brazil—Táíwò returns the discourse on reparations to its
rightful, radical roots. Rather than treating past harms as a ledger
in need of balancing, Táíwò calls for reparations as a
“constructive” process of, as he puts it, “world-making.” In
doing so, he bridges a ​​gap that should never have emerged in
philosophical debates to begin with: the false dichotomy between
addressing past injustices and constructing a better future.

What makes _Reconsidering Reparations_ an important intervention is
Táíwò’s demonstration that reparations for trans-Atlantic slavery
and colonialism are a matter of justice and also a necessary condition
for rising to the existential challenge of global heating. Insisting
on a sustainable future for all—and rejecting genocidal
white-nationalist ecological movements—he clarifies the need to
reckon with the colonialist history of climate apartheid. He also
shows that a “politically serious reparations project . . . must
focus on climate justice.” It’s a huge task for a relatively slim
text, but it aligns with Táíwò’s broader approach as a scholar,
which holds that harms produced and maintained by an entire world
system must be met with responses that are equally planetary in scope.
That the philosopher takes this global scale for granted is no flaw:
in a world ordered by borderless capital, a global approach should be
axiomatic. 

Táíwò works from the premise that a fruitful program of reparations
must be future-looking: How can reparations benefit the communities
most harmed by histories of colonialism and slavery if those
communities remain condemned to suffer and perish in climate
catastrophe? The history of capitalist development has meant that
climate decimation has been unevenly distributed along colonial lines.
Even within the United States, poor Black communities are at the
greatest risk from the consequences of climate change. A program of
reparations that fails to attend to the climate crisis would also fail
to repair the world forged in colonial rule and through slave labor.
In response to the question of why those fighting for a sustainable
climate for all people need to think in terms of reparations, Táíwò
argues that the only way to end climate apartheid is to understand and
undo the systems that produced it.

The late theorist of the Black radical tradition Cedric Robinson used
the framework of “racial capitalism” to describe a system of
capitalism historically and materially structured through colonial
racialization. Táíwò chooses the term “global racial empire” to
drive home this point: the geopolitical world in which we currently
live, he stresses, was built on slavery and colonialism. As he writes,
“The global racial empire created new kinds of injustice and linked
them into entirely new global systems. The constructive view of
reparations I defend here calls for change of equal scope.”

Global racial empire continues to determine the distribution of
accumulated advantages and disadvantages on a planetary scale, as well
as within nation-states (the vast, racist US carceral system stands as
a prime national example). Any robust mobilization against the
genocidal climate crisis will require mass resource redistribution to
undo the work of the global racial empire. This is the heart of
Táíwò’s “constructive” concept of reparations: a
future-looking framework that demands we bring together ideas of
resource redistribution—including but not limited to cash
payments—and racial-justice reparations. 

His work is a particularly welcome salve to tired debates about race,
class, and identity politics. Of course, it serves ruling-class
interests to use ambiguities around calls for reparations to deliver
only symbolic, identity-based offerings—a phenomenon political
scientist Adolph Reed Jr. has often cited as a major problem with the
idea of reparations per se. Yet there’s no need to accept such a
shallow reparations model. 

“When we understand the structure of the world as the pattern of its
motion,” Táíwò writes, “it turns out that history is one of the
most powerful ways we can discern where these invisible currents we
get caught in are coming from, and where they are going, to perceive
where they will pull us under and drown us, and what it would take to
avoid that fate.” The burden remains on those leftists who insist
that we do not talk about race, only class, to answer why we should
ignore such a huge factor in the historic shaping of capitalist
relations. 

Those who seek a framework of reparations that delineates precisely
which individuals have a responsibility to pay reparations and which
individuals have rightful claims to them could find themselves
frustrated with Táíwò’s rejection of reparations that “map
neatly onto contemporary identity binaries: white/Black,
settler/Indigenous, colonizer/colonized.” It is, however, hard to
disagree with his assessment that assigning responsibility on the
basis of contemporary identities—formed as they may be through
histories of colonial oppression—leads to unending traps and
difficult counterexamples. What about the white descendants of
enslaved people? Or the Indigenous descendants of Indigenous slave
owners? 

Táíwò avoids such problems of historic, individualized
responsibility by thinking instead in terms of liability. For him,
corporations and powers that have accumulated advantage through global
racial empire can be considered liable for bearing the costs of
reparations whether or not any of their living representatives can be
said to bear responsibility or fault for past harms. “The racially
advantaged, the Global North, and institutional repositories of
plunder should bear more of the burdens of constructing the just world
order, _not_ because of the relationship that they, _as responsible
moral agents_, hold to the injustices of the past,” he notes.
Instead, “those advantaged by global racial empire should bear more
burdens because of the relationship that their _advantages_ hold to
that history.” 

The idea of a “liability” as distinct from a personal
responsibility should not be strange to us: civil courts regularly
hold institutions, corporations, and governments liable for paying
damages to harmed parties, even if no individuals involved in the
liability-bearing institution were involved in the harm. And we can
name corporate, state, and suprastate institutions and forces, as well
as vast landowners, whose power has directly accrued from the violent
formation and continuance of global racial empire, and who should thus
be liable to cover the bulk of the costs of the reparative
world-making projects we need. 

Táíwò is under no illusions that the capitalist and state powers
advantaged by global racial empire will give up that advantage
willingly. Constructive reparations projects—like any efforts for
major resource and power redistribution—will not be agreed upon with
a polite handshake. As in fraught court cases, liable parties must be
forced to accept liability and pay out, and that pressure will have to
come from below. No powerful international body like the IMF,
organized around enabling the flows of capital to capitalists, would
take on such a task.

So how is his world-making project going to happen? The only way
justice has ever been won: through struggle. Táíwò urges
“trans-local” efforts of resistance, community building,
unionization, and “torch[ing]” tax havens, among other actions. In
contrast to the subtlety of his philosophical arguments, his solutions
may read a little like a grab bag of activist wishes. He nonetheless
offers a compelling framing for justice-oriented actions on the path
to ending global racial empire. 

Táíwò’s suggestion is that we “act like ancestors,” knowing
that the world-making we seek will likely not come anywhere close to
completion in our lifetimes, much as those rebels in the 1835 Malê
revolt did not live to see the end of slavery in their lifetimes. With
this lesson in mind, Táíwò elegantly threads the story of the
revolt—one in which his ancestral peoples played a part—through
the pages of his book. What does it mean to act like would-be
ancestors on a swiftly burning planet? At the very least, it means
acting now. 

_Natasha Lennard
[[link removed]] is the author
of _Being Numerous: Essays on Non-Fascist Life _(Verso, 2019)._

* Repararations
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* Racism
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* Global Capitalism
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* racial capitalism
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