Reconsidering Reparations

In the face of global histories of extraction, domination and dispossession, the project of social justice requires nothing short of remaking the world system. This is the premise of Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò’s Reconsidering Reparations. It follows, then, that we need visionary tools to undertake this project of remaking and reconstruction. Here, we meet the book’s driving argument: that reparations, far from being backward-looking or oriented towards reconciliation and redemption, is a future-facing commitment to building a just world.

Over the course of six chapters, Reconsidering Reparations elaborates the global and historical scale of this central argument, reflecting on numerous examples of land theft, slavery and racial capitalism to map not only the many ways in which domination and dispossession have made the current world system but also how these injustices accumulate disadvantages and will continue to do so unless and until they are actively addressed. If the array of historical examples that are mobilized in the book is at times dizzying to readers, then Táíwò has been successful in illustrating the long and entangled tentacles of what he calls ‘the global racial empire’: the world-making processes of colonial-capitalism through which material and immaterial advantages have been transferred ‘towards the colonizers and away from the colonized … ’ (p.24). Here as well, we learn that it is important to look to the past to understand how advantages and disadvantages build up over time if we are to imagine just futures. This is to say, as Táíwò makes clear, the injustices that reparations needs to respond to are both global and distributive.

The ‘constructive view’ of reparations that this book advocates for is concerned, then, with ‘building a just distribution’ on a world scale (p.10). This is an action-oriented ideal, one that ‘should make tangible differences in the material conditions of people’s lives’ while addressing the moral wrongs of the global racial empire. This is certainly not a thin take on matters of equality or social change. The constructive view of reparations ‘demands that we distribute the costs of making the just world towards those corporations, governments and people that have inherited the moral liabilities of the worldmaking that preceded us’ (p.97).

Here, the term ‘liability’ is used purposefully by Táíwò as a departure from ‘responsibility’, an idea too bound up in laying individual or group blame for the harms of the past. The constructive view of reparation does not entail separating ‘the guilty from the innocent’; such simplistic binary group identities, the book argues, are shaky foundations for building a just world (p.122). Instead, Táíwò offers what I see as one of the most compelling distinctions of this book:

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. Those advantaged by global racial empire should bear more burdens because of the relationship that their advantages hold to that history. (p.123, emphasis in the original).

This distinction – which foregrounds how justice resides in the structural – is most vividly defended within the book’s discussion of climate justice. Táíwò’s examination shows how the distribution of environmental risk and vulnerability within and across countries and populations is tied to the structural accumulation of advantages and disadvantage owing to the global racial empire. Signposting some pathways to justice, the book outlines the ‘targets and tactics’ that a constructive view of reparations could entail: unconditional cash transfers, global climate funding, abolishing tax havens, divesting from fossil fuels and investing in communities, not least community control and solidarity. In each, there are actors (institutions, states) who bear more of the burden to enact these shifts.

But how might these liabilities be collectively recognised and agreed upon, especially by those required to give things up? Readers of this journal might recognise the potential role of education here: the deliberation that can be at the heart of pedagogic relationships; the possible impulse of education to co-create meaning, understanding and ideals. While education is, perhaps understandably, not a central theme within Reconsidering Reparations, there is much in it for the education theorist to pick up. After all, matters of epistemic justice, deliberation, and building new solidarities are key to the project of reparation as much as it is to the project of education. Moreover, the future-oriented view of reparation – its commitment to build something new – offers a framework for thinking through the futures of education too.

The lens of reparation can offer a radical vision for education, one that goes beyond the piecemeal incrementalism of reform which by and large leave the conditions of educational injustice in place. Instead, a ‘reparative future of education’, as I have written about elsewhere, is one that seeks to redress the injustices of education, both past and present, so that these are not carried into tomorrow’s systems of education. As Táíwò recognises, the task of justice has always been large. I can imagine this is why he framed this book around the Malê Revolt against slavery in Brazil; the Malê knew another world is possible – and as Táíwò helps us see, in 1835 they ‘continued a fight that we can help finish’ (p.213).