Reconsidering Reparations
Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism
Beginning with the assertion that the transatlantic slave trade and the colonialism it enabled were unprecedented not in their immorality but in their scale, Olúfémi O. Táíwò argues that undoing that injustice requires we mount an effort to remake the world at the same scale—i.e., that we embark on a project of worldmaking. This is what he terms the constructive form of reparations: distributive justice that looks to the past to construct a transition from the global racial empire we have today to the more just world we wish to arrive at tomorrow—and beyond. Critically, this is a view of reparations and social justice that is entangled with climate justice, for we cannot achieve the former without the latter. There is of course no easy path here. It took generations to build this world, and it will take generations to build the next. Which is all the more reason to start, today.