It has long been an article of faith within the
climate-justice movement that climate justice is racial justice. But what does that actually
mean, Georgetown philosophy professor Olúfémi Táíwò asks, in the face of a
climate catastrophe that threatens to destroy the social and political
conditions required to carry on the historic, multigenerational struggle for
justice on a global scale?
“If slavery and colonialism built the world and
its current basic scheme of social injustice, the proper task of social justice
is no smaller: it is, quite literally, to remake the world,” Táíwò writes in
his seminal 2022 book, Reconsidering Reparations, now out in a new
paperback edition. On a burning planet, he continues, “climate justice and
reparations are the same project: climate crisis arises from the same political
history as racial injustice and presents a challenge of the same scale and
scope.” Succinctly explaining why this deep connection is of the utmost urgency
now, Táíwò goes on to argue that “our response to climate crisis will deeply
determine the possibilities for justice (and injustice) in what remains of this
century—and if we survive to the next.… [The] possibility of keeping justice
alive in our time hinges on our
The reissue of Reconsidering Reparations could hardly be more
timely. Faced with a fossil-fascist Trump administration attempting not
only to dismantle whatever progress the United States has made toward serious
climate action but also the democratic institutions, and democracy itself, that
make such progress possible, the prospect of salvaging any hope of racial and
climate justice is under grave and immediate threat.
Táíwò is more than a philosophy professor; he’s
also a savvy observer of, and participant in, social movements—including the
climate justice movement—and a fellow at Climate &
Community Institute. I spoke to him in late January and again in
April, and what follows has been condensed and edited.
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Wen Stephenson: How do you see the argument of Reconsidering
Reparations in this moment in which Donald Trump is trying to
dismantle any progress toward addressing climate—and not only that, but doing
everything he can to accelerate the crisis?
Olúfémi Táíwò: The argument of the
book is, once we engage with reparations as a practical project, especially a
practical project at a global scale, then anything that prevents us from
changing the world at that scale in the direction of justice is a thing that we
have to contend with if we are really trying to make the world different. And
one thing that I hope is clear now, as the Trump administration accelerates its
project of anti-wokeness, as it continues hollowing out the federal government,
hollowing out public services that protect the common good and especially the
people who are most vulnerable, I don’t think we can wall off the struggle for
racial justice from the struggle for justice more generally.
WS: And
that broader struggle now includes defending democracy on a really basic level
and keeping alive some prospect of a serious response to the climate crisis?
OT: That’s exactly right. One thing that we need to understand
is that this move towards an intensely repressive police state is their plan
for climate change.
[Many of the] people who are building bugout
bunkers for the impending civilizational collapse are the same people allowing,
if not bankrolling, the destruction of public institutions and democratic forms
of the rule of law. Because when the sea levels rise, when people are displaced
by climate injustice, we can either choose the path of justice and solidarity
for all or we can choose the path of death and destruction for most, and
security for a few, and they are trying their hardest to force society onto the
path of the latter.
WS: And
to offer another example, it’s those same people who are literally trying to
destroy Greenpeace for its participation in an Indigenous struggle against
extractive capitalism in the Standing Rock fight. And the examples could
go on and on.
OT: Yes, and it’s important that we put those examples next to
each other. There’s a reason why they think Greenpeace’s standing with
Indigenous peoples at Standing Rock is so dangerous to their political goals.
It’s the same reason why students standing against genocide in Palestine is
so dangerous to their political goals, and the same reason why neighbors
standing together against a massive police installation in Atlanta, Cop City, is so dangerous to their political goals.
Because all of those represent ways of moving toward solidarity as a basic mode
of politics. And in a world where that’s a civic virtue that spreads, you might
not accept letting people die by the millions in climate displacement. You
might not accept letting the rich hide in their bunkers safe and protected
while the rest of us cook on the outside.
WS: At
the end of Reconsidering Reparations, you come around to an idea of
solidarity in a temporal sense and what it means to be an
ancestor, both genealogically and morally—a “moral ancestor.” What does it mean
to think like an ancestor in a global context of climate catastrophe, when it’s
all but certainly too late for certain outcomes, and when some possibilities,
like the Paris Agreement goals of 1.5 and 2C, have been cut off by our
political defeats? In other words, what if we’ve run out of time to be good
ancestors, in your sense of contributing to a long arc of justice, a
multigenerational project of building a just world? Because if we don’t
radically shorten the arc, it’s hard to see how there’s going to be much justice
at all.
OT: First of all, we have run out of time. There’s already
death, deprivation, displacement, devastation from the climate change that we
have failed to avert, and it’s important that we stare that fact in the face,
because that’s what our political defeats mean. We have to contend with the
fact that we have failed the people who are children now and are currently
failing the people who will come after us.
But the fact that we could have had better
versions of the world if we had gotten our act together 30 years ago is no
reason to change our perspective on the fights in front of us. Because
there’s bad,
and as I hope we’re learning over these past few months, there’s worse. Every
gigaton we keep from emitting, every half a degree that we keep the planet from
warming, is a difference between, at least probabilistically speaking, better
and worse versions of the world. No matter how badly we have failed up until
now, we still have the responsibility to do what moves the world in the
direction of justice—those things that are possible from our current position
on the playing field. That’s always the best we can do, and our failures
yesterday, even our failures today, will not stop that from being the thing to
do tomorrow.
What I think is valuable about the perspective
of an ancestor is that we can, one, find a way of relating ourselves to
the rights of these future people, and two, hopefully downstream of that, find
a way of relating our actions to the conditions and the rights and
the justified expectations of future generations.
And something that’s been really helpful to me,
in making this concrete, is studying the politics around the science of climate
change and ecological disaster. So, making this practical for myself, I started
planting trees and trying to learn about soil, just as a hobby. And I
encountered researchers talking to me about the timescale of the earth. It’s
considered good if you can increase the organic matter of your soil a single
percentage point in the space of a decade. That is the time scale of the earth,
of nature.
WS: Of
the land.
OT: Exactly, the land, as a very tangible thing. If you have a
goal, a simple ancestral goal, of trying to leave your kids some nice soil, you
are forced into thinking on the time scale of the earth, a time scale that
matches ancestral thinking. I think there’s a lesson in that, even if we’re
talking about political institutions, which are not as dissimilar from soil as
we would like to think.
OT: Absolutely. And both of those facts we’re seeing right now.
We need to understand how long it takes to build things that are worth defending.
And we need a political perspective about our relationship to our descendants
that is worthy of that time scale.
WS: What
if some of the consequences of the planetary crisis now include increasing
social instability and breakdown—so that the very task of constructing a better
world gets harder and harder, due to climate-driven instability? It seems that
would be all the more reason to emphasize urgency and the need for radical
change in the short term.
OT: Absolutely. The scale of the crisis that confronts us
highlights the need for urgency, even though it also calls for a level of
humility on our part. It would be a herculean effort to both successfully play
defense against the crisis and advance all the way toward the world we want in
the space of one generation. If we can do it, we should. But if we find that we
can’t do that, there’s still, in the long view, something we can do in our
generation, which is put the next generation in the situation to do the next
thing.
Because the other upshot of the ancestor view is
that we don’t have to get everything done all at once, right now. If we think
of advancing toward the world we want in stages, the thing to do at this stage
might just be to prevent the worst version of the world. It might just be to
protect the set of democratic institutions that we have from failing, so that
the next generation of people can inherit democratic institutions that might be
up to the job of actually advancing toward justice in more meaningful ways.
And I think we can take the long view that sees
the urgent task right in front of us as part of the longer, grander project,
even though we might have to content ourselves with something narrower in the
space of the next few decades.
WS: It
seems the urgent task in front of us is nothing less than political
revolution—and yet it’s clear that the climate justice movement, or any other
individual movement, isn’t capable of building the kind of power necessary on
its own. It will require the full force of a resurgent and unified left, a kind
of popular front, that has climate and racial justice as central organizing
principles.
OT: I strongly agree. The idea that the scale of economic-,
energy-system, and political-system change that’s going to be required to deal
with a crisis of this magnitude is going to be negotiated by the aides of a
handful of lawmakers, carefully crafting policy responses—a little subsidy
here, a little tax there—was never an idea that had anything going for it.
If you want to effect the world at that scale—if
you want to make durable changes to energy infrastructure, built
infrastructure, at a scale that would address the climate crisis—you can’t
afford for the other side to have the levers of the state at their disposal.
And if you can’t afford that, then you need at least a mass movement of people who are ready
and disposed to prevent it.
And what that means is that it can’t be only an
activist movement, in the sense of centering around a few people doing actions
and a few people writing white papers. It will have to involve a public
campaign not just of awareness building, but a public campaign of building
people into political subjects and giving them vehicles to wield their
subjecthood through—the kind of thing labor has done in the past. And there
have been a few signs of resurgence towards this in the labor movement, maybe
most notably in the big rank-and-file insurgency within the UAW that
installed Shawn Fain and has been making noise about a
general strike. It isn’t specifically about climate, but that’s the scale of
politics where you might start to have winnable conversations about making a
dent in the climate crisis from the US side of things. And the idea that
there’s any kind of replacement for it is, I think, thoroughly discredited.
Base-building is the right strategy and
approach. It’s not a coincidence that the organizations that take base-building
seriously, and the cultivation of serious political education and participation
by their members, that those are largely the groups behind the wins. I think
that’s what’s meant at bottom by mass-movement politics. It’s not that, oh,
when our protests get to a certain size, then we’re doing mass-movement
politics. It’s when people are participating, as political subjects, in the
historical moment—then it’s possible to change things in more significant ways.
And that’s what we all have to work towards.
