Review, Olufemi Taiwo's Reconsidering Reparations

Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Reconsidering Reparations (Oxford University Press 2022) In arguing for the need to address climate change, there are good reasons to emphasize its novelty. After all, as Stephen Gardiner, Lauren Hartzell-Nichols, Dale Jamieson, and others argue, the diffuse nature of anthropogenic global climate change makes it an especially challenging fit for rights and responsibilities as Western philosophers traditionally regard them. S. Gardiner, A Perfect Moral Storm (Oxford University Press 2011); S. Gardiner & L. Hartzell-Nichols, “Ethics and Global Climate Change,” Nature Education Knowledge 3 (2012); D. Jamieson, Reason in a Dark Time (Oxford University Press 2014). Meanwhile climate skeptics frequently assure us that contemporary climate conditions are not so historically unprecedented as they may seem B. Lomborg, Cool It (Alfred A. Knopf 2007); S. Hatzisavvidou, “‘The Climate Has Always Been Changing’,” Celebrity Studies 12 (2021). - which errs not only in underestimating the social and ecological consequences, but also in assuming that continuity with what has come before justifies inaction. Climate change demands our attention also for the ways in which it is not new, for its connections to historical and persisting injustices in need of reparative response. Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s new book Reconsidering Reparations (Oxford University Press) makes a case for this historical continuity of global injustice and a constructive worldmaking project in response. “I am trying to convince people who are committed to racial justice in some way, shape, or form that the particular way, shape, and form I defend here is a worthwhile one. This task is urgent,” he says, “at a time in human history in which the ability of our social systems to respond to climate crisis may increasingly become definitive of what forms of freedom and security are available and who has them” (p.9). Building on philosophical, historical, and sociological work such as Charles Mills’ The Racial Contract, Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, and Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, Taiwo identifies “Global Racial Empire” as the political and economic order that has structured the world for four centuries and continues to do so today. We are wrong to theorize justice as mostly an internal matter for self-contained societies, to see slavery and capitalism as unrelated systems, to explain away the dominance of Western powers and of white people over people of color in either biological or cultural terms. “Much of political discussion in the world’s richest countries,” Taiwo notes, “simply prefers not to explain what our present social reality is built to do” (p.66). Among other things, global racial empire helps explain accumulation: that is, how advantages and disadvantages build up over time – for better and for worse, for families and communities, over the course of generations. We encounter vivid illustrations of accumulated advantage throughout the book. At one point we trace how the lives of two women and their children take ever more diverging paths through US society in the 20th Century. Elsewhere we see how accumulated advantages enable the British to increase their control over cotton production with the abolition of slavery in the 19th Century. And when we turn in the final chapters to the climate crisis, comparative accumulated advantage continues to play a significant explanatory role, both critically and constructively, in identifying who has been made most vulnerable to climate change and who is most obligated to enact a constructive response to it. If global climate injustices today and to come are inextricably connected to past and persisting global racial empire, so too are climate reparations inextricable from reparations generally. And if global racial empire and anthropogenic climate change are literally worldmaking projects of global injustice, then so too must social justice literally “remake the world” (p.67). This is why Taiwo articulates and advocates a constructive view of reparation, which he distinguishes from harm repair and relationship repair views. Harm repair views conceive reparative justice as a matter of restitution or retribution; relationship repair conceives it in terms of reconciliation between parties that have been driven apart by their or others’ prior wrongdoings. It is not that these three views are mutually exclusive, Taiwo explains, but they emphasize and commit us to different things. A key feature of reparations as harm repair is that harm must be clearly determined against some appropriate baseline, and in the contexts of trans-Atlantic slavery, colonialism, and climate change this can be not just complicated but existentially fraught. The causal and metaphysical problems here are too much to untangle. For relationship repair, meanwhile, the focus is on improving the conditions of inter-group relations, which means improving the material living conditions of recipients of reparations is indirectly valuable, “playing at best an instrumental role in explaining both how we would justify reparations projects and what they would be designed to accomplish” (p.142). Taiwo worries that this approach decenters what should be the most important standard by which to evaluate reparations for global racial empire. I think Taiwo’s criticisms of existing accounts of reparations are pretty fair. But I would also say that those of us who find relationship repair accounts compelling have good reason to align with reparations as a worldmaking project. A cornerstone of such accounts is the moral priority given to the perspectives and subjectivities of those who have been wronged to guide the reparative process: for example, in identifying the forms that amends should take and the conditions under which forgiveness is warranted. M. Walker, What is Reparative Justice? (Marquette University Press 2010); B. Almassi, Reparative Environmental Justice in a World of Wounds (Lexington Books 2020). So long as the material living conditions of those who are owed reparations matter to those parties themselves, they matter for relational repair. And as a blueprint for what would need to happen to repair the conditions for morally adequate relationality damaged by global climate change and other historical and persisting moral atrocities, worldmaking as Taiwo describes it demands serious consideration. Reflecting on Nkechi Taifa’s argument for a Republic of New Afrika, Taiwo notes, “The moral impetus for the project is the past and present treatment of enslaved people and their descendants. But the target of the project – the difference it wants to make in the world produced by those moral crimes – is neither a project of reconciliation nor redemption. It is a forward-looking target, a future goal to remake the world map, in this case by adding a self-determining country” (p.72). New nations are not enough on their own, Taiwo cautions. Given the accumulated weight of history, the distributive justice required of constructive reparations requires not only formal sovereignty but real individual and collective freedom – “a world where people can relate to each other on terms of non-domination rather than on the terms of domination we’ve inherited” (p.99). Here Taiwo aligns more with Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum’s capabilities approach than with narrowly resourcist theories of justice. “The worldmaking perspective on justice, then, is concerned with material and social resources, formal rules and norms, and also with informal patterns of attention and care” (p.97). What makes this a reparative rather than an ideal conception of justice is its historical nature: the accumulated advantages and disadvantages of global racial empire matter in order to understand how we got here, how to get from here to a more just political order, and how to distribute the costs of doing so. If this seems like a huge endeavor, Taiwo does not disagree. “It may well be outside of any generation’s ability to win outright,” he allows. “But if we choose to relate to the world as ancestors, we can prevent this realization from overwhelming us into political paralysis” (p.11). In part this involves our recognition of all that those who came before us did to advance the project of social justice as well as the risk not only of stagnation but actually losing those gains should we fail to continue their work. It also means not trying to construct a just world order in a single heroic effort but building something that future people can build further upon. This is nowhere truer than it is for climate change. “Responding to environmental calamity and its impact on public health requires a working epistemic infrastructure: robust networks of knowledge and trust,” Taiwo observes (p.169). These networks develop (and deteriorate) over multiple generations. Given deeply rooted distrust and discord, we cannot (re)build them overnight – but then neither can future generations if we don’t do our part in the meantime. “It often takes everything a generation has just to win the struggle immediately in front of them. But if they pass on the right things – and if we the generations that follow pick up what they left for us – that can be enough” (p.200). Readers of this journal will notice Reconsidering Reparations is tacitly yet consistently anthropocentric in orientation. Taiwo does not explicitly deny the intrinsic value of other animals, nor the holistic value of ecosystems and their constituent members, but when these things factor into the narrative of global racial empire and climate injustice, they do so instrumentally. Racial reparations in the form of land cessions are closely considered, for example; Taiwo recognizes how settler colonialism devastates indigenous lifeways tied to specific lands; land figures notably in the story of how his home institution Georgetown University fits into global racial empire. What remains largely unaddressed is land as more than mere soil, land as a biotic community, and how nonhuman animals taken individually and collectively figure into capitalism, colonialism, and climate change. Here one might reply that attending to human considerations in the historical and continuing narrative of global racial empire is already difficult enough. The book is indeed vast in its scope, and to my eye Taiwo is most impressive when tracing the subtle (and not so subtle) intersections of slavery, capitalism, racism, colonialism, religion, gender, sexuality, and disability. The anthropocentrism reads less as a fatal flaw than a missed opportunity to continue this intersectional analysis. Taiwo’s view of freedom as non-domination could converge usefully with ecofeminism on the domination of women and nature; given his affinity for the capabilities approach, he could join Nussbaum in extending global justice to also include nonhuman animals. K. Warren, Ecofeminist Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield 2000); M. Nussbaum, Frontiers of Justice (Harvard University Press 2006). Reconsidering Reparations will be a rewarding read for political philosophers, environmental ethicists, and other scholars interested in climate change and reparative, restorative, or transitional justice. Given its scope and readability, it would be a fine centerpiece for an interdisciplinary honors seminar or courses in political philosophy and global studies. Most of all I am interested to see how activists and policymakers take up or at least reckon with Taiwo’s vision of climate justice and reparative racial justice domestically and internationally as a unified project. Ben Almassi, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Governors State University, University Park IL 60484, balmassi@govst.edu