Abstract
After the 2020 uprisings which proclaimed “Black Lives Matter,” popular media have been replete stories depicting white settler’s guilt about what the world owes Black and marginalized peoples, as well as intense political backlash against racial justice (e.g., Harding, 2022). After the broadcast of George Floyd’s murder in 2020, this “guilt” was exemplified by pledges from politicians, public and private organizations, and corporations toward “racial justice” that sought to respond to the widespread street rebellions and longstanding social and economic inequities provoked by racial terror and police violence against Black people in the United States and internationally. These pledges included corporate donations, revamped diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies, public statements, recruitment activity, reading groups, among other myriad so-called examples of “racial justice” actions.
As Black and racialized communities have faced accumulating crises not of their own making, from the COVID-19, to further economic fallout and climate change, a rightwing counterattack followed. This white nationalist backlash vehemently and misguidedly opposed “Critical Race Theory” which became a mischaracterized nomenclature of (all) anti-racist discourse and a bogeyman concocted by a heterogeneous group of white and conservative-leaning political operators aiming to uphold white supremacy and to oppose demographic and justice-led political change, actions and philosophies. In the wake of Donald Trump’s election, this rightwing resurgence quickly aimed to invalidate claims for redress and restitution made by African diasporic communities and allies protesting racist, state-sanctioned violence and policy.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Rethinking Reparations, published amid this ongoing backlash, reflects some underlying political and intellectual tensions, especially related to climate change, which has become the new frontier of capitalist crisis, uneven development and struggle (Táíwò, 2022). Táíwò attempts an ambitious project that centers the transnational experiences of anti-Black violence and colonial oppression that have historically resulted in what he considers a global division of accumulated “advantages and disadvantages” (p. 25) among communities racialized as white compared to those Black and Indigenous across the Global North and South. The book undoubtedly takes the political present as a starting point, as it responds to ever-growing political and popular calls of the African diaspora for social justice and restitution in the form of reparations. These demands have historically faced strident opposition by extraterritorial and settler colonial-capitalist states and powers in the United States and Europe.
Táíwò reflects extensively on “injustice” and “oppression” on a global scale built on the edifice of what he terms “global racial empire” (Táíwò, 2022, p. 10). Chapter 2 is devoted to an extensive and worthy-of-reading appraisal of World History that contributed to this division of advantages and disadvantages among white people compared to Black and Indigenous groups. Drawing generously from liberal viewpoints, scientific data, and philosophy, Táíwò suggests “it is not, in a straightforward sense, the fault of present-day descendants of settlers or whites that other people’s descendants have a harder time of things. Nor was the world order founded centuries before their birth caused by their actions” (p. 122). It is from this basis, that the author’s “constructive view” (Chapter 3) of reparations can be understood. He argues that his constructive view is a “historically informed view of distributive justice” that serves a “world-making” end (p. 74). The constructive view is built upon understanding what’s at the core of the division of cumulative social advantages and disadvantages to better help distribute “income and wealth,” (p. 87) and is primarily based on Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach (p. 88).
Influential in philosophy and development economics, Amartya Sen’s work emphasizes the expansion of “real freedoms” that people are able to exercise through social and economic arrangements and civil and political liberties (Sen, 2001). Removing the constraints to the enjoyment of freedoms through expanding individual and political capabilities, such as poverty, authoritarianism, violence, hunger, homelessness and so on should be targeted through what he calls “instruments.” The achievement of these freedoms is possible through the expansion of “economic opportunities, political liberties, social powers, and the enabling conditions of good health, basic education, and the encouragement and cultivation of initiatives” that, for him, are constitutive of development (Sen, 2001, p. 5). He further suggests that the market mechanism provides the possibility for “development as freedom” to be achieved, as individuals value this means of economic interchange.
In this manner, drawing upon the methodology of Amartya Sen that stresses “intergroup contrasts” within (and across) geographies, Reconsidering Reparations adopts what Robbie Shilliam refers to as hermeneutic pluralism to claim freedom as the expansion of individual functionings and capabilities through the neoliberal market (Shilliam, 2012). In a similar way, the book uplifts the status quo through its “remaking the world” paradigm in which the market remains fundamental to accessing “new” freedoms. The book thus traverses a series of logical, intellectual and methodological incongruities to arrive at its “constructive view” of reparations that underlies market freedom as a critical principle. The author oddly cites Karl Marx, Eric Williams, Sylvia Wynter, and Amilcar Cabral at strategic points, all of whom have offered radical criticisms of world markets. He then rests his analysis on the Senian capability approach to freedom that implies teleological modernization that centers (state and) capitalist mechanisms.
The unit of analysis shifts from (hypothetical) individual struggles and experiences of social advantage contrasting with disadvantage due to family social positioning (Táíwò, 2022, pp. 76–82). It then aims to “distribute capabilities justly to make a new world” (Táíwò, 2022, p. 98). In this way, the sum of an individual’s experiences or relations in the world market reflects their positioning in relation to their ability to accumulate wealth or social advantage on the one hand, and to alleviate mass poverty or social disadvantage on the other. Implicit here is a naturalization of individual/social welfare, and the idea of marginal productivity in which homoeconomicus can generate better rewards through market freedom. These ideas remain unchallenged. While negative unequal resource distribution is scrutinized, individual efforts and endowments remain central to the analysis. However, it does not neatly and coherently follow from an analysis of “global racial empire” and its fallout.
While new distributions of wealth and income are envisaged and extrapolated from realizing “world-making,” the politics of class struggle and conflict do not feature. Freedom is offered up to readers in this hermeneutic Senian framing, which fits oddly within the book’s overall analysis of racialized imperialism. Based on redistributing “functionings and capabilities,” freedom can be achieved, and not on ways of organizing life under alternative economic and social systems. It does not follow that new or collective capabilities that are individually or socially oriented add up to the “remaking of the world” in any meaningful way. In this regard, Táíwò is tethered to pragmatism of the present, albeit through some appreciation of the past. He seems less committed to radical and broader imagination and alternatives that dismantle erstwhile structures, or terms of Black repair that center Black and racialized community demands (Lewis, 2022).
In Chapter 3, the author suggests, that under a “harm repair approach” (Táíwò, 2022, p. 124–127) which he examines as one reparative method, with reference to the Flint water crisis, that theoretically “reparations” might include “polluting white neighborhoods’ air and poisoning their wells” (Táíwò, 2022, p. 127). However, he argues rightly that this would not advance racial justice. In contrast to his “constructive view,” he charges that these reparative frameworks are “anti-politics” (Táíwò, 2022, p. 127). A major contradiction lies in a belief that a policy framework relying on the “constructive view” is an answer without refusing the ongoing and expanding presence of colonial-capitalism’s materialist logic to create difference and inequality (Wynter, 2003; Gilmore, 2017). Táíwò’s (2022) theoretical proposition is therefore incompatible with historical materialist or decolonial understandings, and is more consistent with a reconstituted liberal outlook. In this sense, he concludes that white people and inheritors of advantage or wealth must “decide on a path to follow” and do not have to pay for the harms of the past (p. 207). Reparations are to be offered not to correct harms of the past, but to build a new potential future.
From this perspective “climate justice” is taken up in Chapter 4 though discussion is initiated in the previous “What’s Missing” chapter. The constructive view, while making use of liberal philosophical analysis that takes the world and historical harms as given. This is contradictory to a materialist political economy, which has as its basis in understanding the real world based on challenging the existing social relations between (racialized) workers and capital. It also papers over essential elements of the Black radical tradition, and which puts forward alternative conceptions of freedom through transformation and collective struggle and imagining that start with abolishing the settler-colonial state (Kelley, 2021).
In Chapter 4, the author suggests that in the current era, “climate justice and reparations are the same project” (p. 147). However, the connections between colonialism and climate crisis and reparations for the trans-Atlantic slavery and colonialism are “largely contingent” (p. 158). For Táíwò, solutions comprise “targets” and “tactics” (pp. 172–190), similar to Sen’s “instruments” that are committed to continuing aspects of the current social and economic system. These proposals offer a myriad of outcomes across places because of, given his own analysis, differentiated advantages and disadvantages (pp. 168–169). They may therefore be inappropriate or undesirable for communities affected who wish to articulate their own needs and demands. The “Green New Deal,” that he proposes, does not challenge capital itself, and is not drawn from “subaltern” epistemes and principles, but constitutes reformist ideas couched in a “developmental imaginary” (Shilliam, 2012). They take for granted that Black communities themselves need to decide their own terms of repair that take their ways of being, knowing, doing and organizing seriously that may even take an anti-capitalist, decolonial or eco-socialist path (Ajl, 2021; Lewis, 2022; Shilliam, 2012).
The book does not seriously and effectively oppose the inadequacies, contradictions and constraints of capitalism (Táíwò, 2022, p. 203) that led us to climate breakdown nor the differential suffering among marginalized communities as a basis for reparative justice. It incredulously mixes various intellectual traditions and political projects without appreciating the contradictions and divergencies among them. Implicit here is the author’s hope for some remediation of the worse effects of capitalism that may hopefully tend toward improved social advantages, but not a desire for overall systemic transformation or abolition (p. 203). Finally, what Rethinking Reparations achieves, despite its intellectual, methodological, and political inconsistencies, is to place reparations within a broader perspective that appreciates historical accumulations that contribute to climate crisis and offers a perspective on how we might (re)make that world differently.
