00:01:19.780He also is committed to public engagement and is publishing articles in popular outlets
00:01:26.120with general readership exploring intersections between climate justice and colonialism.
00:01:49.780to be talking about these themes in this way with you. Thanks a lot. I'm excited to be here.
00:01:55.840Well, Olufemi, I initially came across your work through your article,
00:02:00.320The Green New Deal and the Danger of Climate Colonialism. And so I'd like to begin our
00:02:05.520conversation by sort of breaking down what climate colonialism means for listeners.
00:02:11.160As a scholar of colonialism, how do you see national pursuits of green energy
00:02:16.000through proposed legislation like the Green New Deal, potentially echoing colonialism under the
00:02:22.060guise of sustainable development and carbon offsets? So the basic standpoint that I have
00:02:30.840on colonialism kind of involves a different sort of stance, a different framework on what
00:02:38.060colonialism is to begin with before we even talk about climate colonialism. I think what most
00:02:44.640people imagine, you know, even myself, before I started studying this intensely, what most people
00:02:50.500imagine when they think of colonialism is somebody showing up with a flag and planning it on some
00:02:57.140territory and saying, this belongs to the queen or the king. And obviously, that has something to do
00:03:04.660with colonialism. But that's not the whole story about what colonialism is. So what is colonialism?
00:03:12.300At its base, at its root, colonialism, if you look at prominent anti-colonial activists and fighters like Amilcar Cabral, they think of colonialism as the control of a culture and economy by a foreign power.
00:03:30.620And so one way that could happen is by military invasion or by settler conquest, but that could actually happen in a variety of ways, a number of ways. And throughout history, we've seen a pretty wide variety of techniques that some countries and corporations use to control the economy and social life of places, sometimes very far away and sometimes very near.
00:03:56.720and so when we think of colonialism we should think of broadly foreign control of social life
00:04:04.040which includes our economy how we produce things but also includes how we relate to each other
00:04:10.420how we move on in the world how what kind of art we produce what kind of thinking we do so on so
00:04:16.520forth and until actually quite recently in history much of colonial domination was of the very
00:04:25.440explicit flag planting variety. So in 1946, for example, just after the Second World War,
00:04:34.240there were only 35 member states in the United Nations because much of the world was under the
00:04:39.720control of some of those states. But after the Second World War, there was a wave of
00:04:47.380anti-colonial movements concentrated in Africa and Asia. And by 1970, the number of independent
00:04:55.640countries had increased to 127, which just gives you a sense of how much of the world was under
00:05:02.720the explicit formal domination of some other part of the world. From there,
00:05:09.380what happened afterwards some people characterize as neocolonialism so there were multinational
00:05:18.200institutions like the world bank the international monetary fund there were treaty arrangements
00:05:24.440between different countries in the so-called developed world and the so-called developing
00:05:31.460world and there were corporate arrangements to either maintain or create new arrangements of
00:05:38.900control. And you put all those things together and you get a system, which people like Ghana's0.99
00:05:46.680first prime minister in Krumah called neocolonialism. And it's this sense, this kind of
00:05:53.240colonialism that makes the most sense of how something like Green New Deal or climate policy
00:05:58.780generally could fit into neocolonialism. If the way that, for example, a large country and a large
00:06:06.980emitting country like the United States decides to produce climate targets puts pressures stated
00:06:13.520or unstated on the developing countries of the world whether it's for their resources like
00:06:20.040lithium which is commonly used in electric batteries or whether it's their climate policy
00:06:28.080more generally if the U.S. for example doesn't set ambitious enough emissions target and eats up
00:06:34.200most of the world's carbon budget. These are ways that the policies and the social life of places
00:06:41.160near and far from the United States could be dominated by what the United States does in
00:06:46.540legislation like the Green New Deal or what it fails to do.
00:06:50.880I'm wondering, how do climate justice movements avoid repeating this history?
00:06:56.860That's a complicated question. And I think it involves a number of approaches. And I think it involves a number of kinds of targets. So on the approach side, I think generally, the thing that you want to do in politics is work with people rather than try to work on behalf of people.
00:07:21.000Right. So a movement based in something like solidarity in the way that, for example, unions or organized workers relate to each other.
00:07:30.280That's a kind of basic model for how we should relate to each other in politics and I think quite generally in social life.
00:07:39.760And so environmentalist groups based in the global north or the first world or the rich countries in the world, whatever you want to say, those countries working with, working alongside groups based in the global south is a good start for a basic kind of blueprint for how to avoid contributing to climate colonialism.
00:08:06.980But I think it's a little more than that. I think it's a little bit more complicated than that because there's always going to be the question of who adequately represents the interests of a group, whether they're based in the global north or whether they're based in the global south.
00:08:22.200And there's just the standard thorny policy and technical questions about what policy actually serves those interests. And those questions are a lot more difficult than especially more ideologically inclined groups often make them sound.
00:08:39.980There are just difficult questions about how our ecological system works and how our social systems work and what things are possible or desirable against that backdrop.
00:08:51.500And so I think one of the things that's going to be necessary to identify which pieces of policy or action actually serve people's interests is a much closer collaboration between the sort of people who research those things, the natural scientists, the social scientists, and what have you, and the movements on the ground who are defending justice, whether they're based in the global north or the south.
00:09:18.700Mm hmm. I'd like to discuss land grabs a bit more and the ramifications of so-called public and private lands being freely sold to foreign interests. So can you share with us what role the financial crisis of the 2000s had in catalyzing agricultural land acquisition abroad? And what do you see happening in the next couple of decades, should this transfer of land continue in places across the so-called global south?
00:09:46.960Yeah, that's a really important question. And I think that question is at the root of the question of climate colonialism, because land access is so related to resource access and how our global supply chains function.
00:10:04.620So the going story about the current situation in land acquisition, especially large-scale land acquisition, dates back to the global financial crisis of 2007 and 2008.
00:10:22.300That's when major financial institutions like the Lehman Brothers were on the ropes and the world's monetary system was at risk.
00:10:31.420One of the things that happened during this crisis was a spike in commodity prices, right? So things like food become more expensive, which means that the basis for growing food, land, especially arable land, becomes more potentially lucrative.
00:10:51.720And partially because of that and partially because of kind of longstanding vulnerability of land, especially in the global south to transnational capital, there was what some researchers call a global land rush.
00:11:09.860so there was a large surge of land acquisition especially in the global south and very much
00:11:18.740especially on the African continent by some estimates the rate of land expansion was
00:11:25.800increased by 20 times compared to before the crisis and also by another estimate something
00:11:34.220like a quarter of the available arable land on the African continent was bought up by large-scale
00:11:41.380land acquisition as capital moved around the globe. And what that means, functionally speaking,
00:11:49.740is that a lot of the land and a lot of the political control over land is in the hands of
00:11:59.060a few very rich people, whether they're fund managers of some kind, or whether they're
00:12:06.200indigenous elites on the African continent. But their bottom line, their interests are going to
00:12:14.640be quite different from the interests of African people in general. They're going to be quite1.00
00:12:20.500different from the interests of the masses of people anywhere on the planet in general. And
00:12:25.340What serves their bottom line, what serves their profit margins, what stabilizes their returns on investment, doesn't bear any necessary relationship at all to what's going to be good for the planet, to what's going to be good for the local communities who live in, on, and around the land that has been purchased by this method.
00:12:47.240And it bears no necessary relationship to what's going to be good from the perspective of climate policy, especially as climate policies hew themselves to the market, which responds to dollars and cents supply and demand and not to what's ecologically sustainable and not to what's just from a moral and political perspective.
00:13:17.240Yeah, it makes me wonder what countries are being targeted and why. And, you know, my mind wanders because I'm specifically curious about countries in Africa being targeted for energy use, and especially countries that are predicted to become relatively uninhabitable.
00:13:35.740Like, what is being done to help people in arid African countries mitigate the impacts of climate change versus how much land is being bought up? And yeah, I just could see a lot of precarious things happening in this dynamic. So yeah, I'd love for you to expand on that if you would.
00:13:56.860yeah so the short answer is not enough is being done to protect the people in this part of the
00:14:07.100world especially by comparison to how much is being done to protect the elites who own
00:14:13.660the land that they would need to be managed in a public and community-centered way if they're
00:14:21.800going to get through the climate crises and the impacts of climate crisis as they accelerate over
00:14:27.940the next part of this century. Part of the story here is that the kinds of ownership of land,
00:14:39.280sort of private ownership, deeded ownership, often held by an individual person or perhaps
00:14:45.240an individual group of people as opposed to managed in common by coalitions of community
00:14:53.420members, not every kind of ownership of land is recognized the same way by the market.
00:15:02.640So you might have a situation where indigenous groups or a sort of consortium of ethnic groups
00:15:08.880maybe, or just various communities, however you'd like to describe them, are accustomed to living
00:15:17.000and working and engaging with the land in a certain way. But it may not be the case any
00:15:24.760particular person has a deed from the government saying that they're allowed to do so, right?
00:15:31.260The establishment of record keeping and the maintenance of record keeping of this kind,
00:15:38.040and the recognition of record-keeping practices of ways of sharing the land that were proliferated
00:15:44.580by colonialism, by the British Empire, the French Empire, the Portuguese Empire, didn't necessarily
00:15:50.880recognize all of those varied ways that people can relate to land and people can relate to rights
00:15:57.260to land. So what that amounts to is there's a sort of political vulnerability when capitalism
00:16:08.060is as mobile as it is across state borders and can buy the titles for lands, whether or not
00:16:17.780those titles, those legal documents correspond to how people have actually been using the land
00:16:23.760or what rights over the land people recognize an individual
00:16:29.060or groups of people as having, so on and so forth.
00:16:32.620So I think that's part and parcel of the problem here.
00:16:36.520But in terms of what's being done for the people who, say,
00:16:41.040live on the African continent or live in the quilombos of Brazil
00:16:45.360or who live in any part of the world that's being targeted
00:16:51.020by land acquisition, and that is at risk of displacement led by climate events.
00:16:58.340What's being done overwhelmingly is the intensification of draconian border policies.
00:17:07.000So the concentration camps on the United States' southern border, for example, is the
00:17:14.640United States' response to climate crisis in parts of the world like Guatemala, which already have
00:17:23.920people fleeing conditions that climate crisis have contributed to. On the positive side, there are
00:17:31.560some multinational instruments like the Green Climate Fund that is supposed to provide a way
00:17:38.280for richer countries to dedicate money and resources towards green development for developing
00:17:46.800countries. But the target set for raising money by some researchers' estimates in the first place
00:17:57.720was too low. And the amount of money that has actually been raised for the Green Climate Fund
00:18:05.560hasn't even met that meager target. And so right now there's a lot more social resources being
00:18:15.420put towards the extraction of resources and the profit that resource access makes possible
00:18:26.040and to the punitive policing of people who are trying to now flee the worst impacts of
00:18:35.520climate crisis and the preparation of a draconian policy for the people who will in the future
00:18:42.800be trying to avoid the worst impacts of climate crisis.
00:18:49.540You've pointed out that there is tension amongst environmentalists when it comes to
00:18:54.640carbon capture, with some very prominent environmental groups advocating that carbon
00:18:59.900removal be withheld from any Green New Deal. But when I think about the glaring inequalities
00:19:06.440between the countries that have contributed to the vast majority of global emissions versus the
00:19:12.040countries that are already experiencing the ramifications, it feels cruel to shut this
00:19:17.640conversation down altogether. So how should we think about carbon capture in terms of, as you
00:19:23.780put it, rectifying historical climate injustices. What needs to be centered in the development of
00:19:30.240carbon removal strategies? I think people are worried about carbon removal for two reasons
00:19:38.200that are, I think, very intelligent responses to some serious problems with carbon removal.
00:19:46.800So first, people are very rightly suspicious of who they've been seeing advocate for carbon
00:19:55.100removal. Some of the best resourced advocates for carbon removal are fossil fuel companies
00:20:04.000who favor approaches like enhanced oil recovery, which ultimately could serve their bottom line
00:20:10.700quite easily. And since they are the best resourced, they are also the people that
00:20:18.820folks have likeliest heard from on the issue of carbon removal. So that suspicion, I think,
00:20:27.600is very warranted. Secondly, people are concerned that the development of carbon removal would serve
00:20:35.600as a kind of moral hazard or a blank check that would justify and excuse future emissions.
00:20:45.280So, you know, as I've been trying to stress, I think these are very good reasons to be dubious
00:20:52.720about just any version of advocating for carbon removal. But at the same time, I think what you
00:21:00.740said is also accurate, right? We're in the United States, for example, very disproportionately
00:21:07.700responsible for the cumulative emissions over the last century and a half or so that drive the
00:21:15.200climate crisis. And so after having polluted the planet that we all live and breathe in to that
00:21:23.340extent, from a justice perspective, it doesn't make sense to me to wash our hands of our past
00:21:32.500emissions and refuse to develop carbon removal technologies or refuse to deploy carbon removal
00:21:40.140technologies. And I think what's crucial about the way I said it just now is a difference in
00:21:47.640framework from one way of thinking about carbon removal technologies, which I think people
00:21:53.940rightfully identify as problematic, and maybe a different way, an alternative way that better
00:21:59.500situates it from the standpoint of justice. So if you think what carbon removal is about,
00:22:05.580is about clearing the way for future emissions, right? If it's future oriented, if it's a thing
00:22:12.660that we do so that we can keep business as usual going with respect to burning fossil fuels and
00:22:20.980continuing to emit at an unsustainable pace, then absolutely, you should oppose that approach to
00:22:28.540the climate crisis. And if that's what carbon removal means for some people, then they are
00:22:36.320absolutely getting something wrong right there's no path forward that is sustainable that is at
00:22:42.740all compatible with justice that doesn't involve significantly scaling back our future emissions
00:22:49.060but if you think of carbon removal not as a blank check for the future but as a sort of
00:22:57.080reparations check for the past, right, as sort of a response to past years of emissions, which
00:23:07.400have built up in the atmosphere. I think from that perspective, it's not only obvious that
00:23:14.820especially global north richer nations should be investing in carbon removal research and
00:23:21.680deployment, but it's, I think, obvious that they have to from a perspective of justice.
00:23:29.540The best science of which I am aware, the IPCC, for example, the models that show what's necessary
00:23:37.240for preventing the worst impacts of climate crisis, almost all seem to include some use
00:23:47.280of carbon removal on a gigaton scale, which is billions of tons. That's a lot of carbon removal,
00:23:55.700right? So that suggests that we have to do some research there. We have to do some
00:23:59.320deployment there. If that's the case, then the moral question about carbon removal is better
00:24:09.920addressed to how to distribute the burdens and benefits of carbon removal rather than the
00:24:15.720question of whether or not to do carbon removal, because regardless of whether or not it's going
00:24:20.240to give us the wrong idea, the driving thing is how the ecosystem will respond to the presence
00:24:27.000or absence of carbon removal. So I think the better framework for carbon removal is a justice
00:24:35.220framework where we instead ask the question, who should bear the burdens of rolling this out and
00:24:44.640researching it. And I would say the global north, high-emitting countries, especially those high-emitting
00:24:51.660countries that have a history of colonial domination, those countries and those corporations
00:25:00.240should be on the hook for developing and rolling out carbon removal.
00:25:44.640Yeah, I definitely agree with you on that.
00:26:08.760And this leads me to transitioning our conversation to discuss climate reparations, but perhaps we can first begin by distinguishing the difference between harm-based repair versus relationship repair.
00:26:24.480How do you situate these two different types of repair and why is the conversation on climate reparations so long overdue?
00:26:32.480so the distinction between harm repair and relationship repair are two different categories
00:26:43.480that you could use to think about reparations in general but i think especially reparations
00:26:50.000on a global scale which is the scale i think you would have to think of if you were thinking
00:26:54.680about reparations for things like transatlantic slavery and colonialism because these things
00:27:01.300just built world politics, right? They built the planet-sized economic system and political system
00:27:08.220that we have. Harm-based repair is a way of thinking about reparations that says, well,
00:27:15.220some people in the world are worse off than they would have been if it weren't for colonialism,
00:27:22.060if it weren't for the slave trade, if it weren't for this level of emissions.
00:27:26.520and I think that gets something important right which is that what we should be thinking about
00:27:35.220primarily is how well off people are whether or not people have what they need whether they have
00:27:40.480food water shelter those are the things that should drive how we think about these issues
00:27:44.640but the comparison that it appeals to the comparison of the hypothetical case of how
00:27:54.520well off we'd be if it weren't for the slave trade, let's say, as opposed to how well off
00:28:00.740people would be or people are, given that there has been a slave trade. I think that gets you
00:28:06.780into thorny waters and questions that are hard to answer about how you set up that hypothetical.
00:28:14.520And so partially to avoid those complications, some people started thinking about reparations
00:28:19.280in a different way altogether. They thought, well, reparations is about fixing an injustice,
00:28:27.260but not in terms of welfare, but fixing an injustice in terms of our ongoing moral relationships to
00:28:36.160each other based on the fact that this injustice happened and the fact that it hasn't been
00:28:41.820addressed by something like reparations. And there's different ways to get that going.
00:28:47.580But what I prefer to use to think about reparations, the way I prefer to think about it is building the kind of world we want to live in, building the just world, right?
00:29:01.700There's a variety of ways that we can do that.
00:29:04.400And I think the stakes of the climate crisis make that variety of ways actually quite a bit concrete in terms of the decisions we have to make over the coming century.
00:29:20.500And to say it theoretically, I could say something that probably doesn't mean much to a lot of people.
00:29:26.140I would say what reparations is for me on the constructive view is the achievement of a target, right, building the just world and the distribution of benefits and burdens in that construction project.
00:29:45.300So as we build that just world, how do we distribute the benefits and burdens?
00:29:53.480Who do we make do the hard things? Who do we make take on the sacrifices? Who get the benefits of
00:30:01.700that transition? And so on and so forth. That's all abstract. It perhaps doesn't mean much. But
00:30:09.020I think it means something very concrete if we're talking about staring in the face of climate
00:30:15.280crisis. So suppose we have a picture of the world that we think is just. Maybe we think
00:30:21.700the whole world should be a set of democracies, maybe regional democracies. Suppose we think we
00:30:28.780have a viewpoint of there should be a world government, for example, or maybe we think
00:30:35.880there should be a particular parliamentary system. Maybe we think there should be a certain kind of
00:30:43.260distribution of income, right? We want a certain kind of tax structure,
00:30:49.700or a certain kind of job guarantee structure that works everywhere.
00:30:55.120Just pick whatever your picture of justice is, right?
00:30:59.160And that's an important thing to have an opinion on what the just world looks like.
00:31:06.060I think regardless of what justice looks like to you,
00:31:10.040I doubt anyone would look at the world as we have it and say that we're there yet.
00:31:14.560So I think everyone would agree that it's going to take some time
00:31:17.740getting from where the world is now and the status quo to whatever the just version of
00:31:24.880the world is, whatever the good version of the world is. If all that you care about is eventually
00:31:30.660getting to the just world, then maybe you don't care about the inequalities that are going to be
00:31:40.160built into the suffering of the impending climate crisis, so long as by 2150, for example,
00:31:48.040we get to the just world. But suppose you do, right? Suppose you think it matters not just
00:31:55.160whether or not we eventually get justice, but it matters how we get there. Then here's the thing
00:32:00.540you might find bracing. Here's the thing that you might find unacceptable. The fact that on the
00:32:09.320current trajectory, which is something like four or even five degrees centigrade by the end of this,
00:32:17.380by the end of the century, large parts of global south cities and predominantly black and0.80
00:32:26.100indigenous parts of the world will be underwater. That something on the order of 140 million people0.99
00:32:34.720will be displaced within their own own countries, many more beyond the borders of their own
00:32:41.660countries, that the century to come might congeal into a system of climate apartheid
00:32:50.540where the richest people within a country or community will be able to insulate themselves
00:32:58.880from the worst parts of climate crisis
00:33:25.880have achieved the just world or just society. From that point of view, the transition costs,
00:33:34.340the justice of how we get to the just world from here is very important. And that's the perspective
00:33:42.620that I think of, I call it the constructive view. It's something that I think was part and parcel
00:33:49.440of how people thought about justice during the anti-colonial movements of the 50s, 60s, and 70s,
00:33:58.880especially on the African continent. And it's a political perspective that I think we should
00:34:05.060return to, and that has a lot to tell us about how to achieve justice and what we should be
00:34:10.400looking for out of justice in the response to climate crisis. In a working draft of
00:34:17.260Reconsidering Reparations, the Movement for Black Lives and Self-Determination, you write, quote,
00:34:23.700even had reparations been paid shortly after the abolition of slavery, how could one repair,
00:34:29.880say, whatever harm was done to a child born in the condition of slavery?
00:34:34.760For this individual's life, there is no before to return to. Put generally, it may be impossible to
00:34:41.180make sense of an individual harm claim on the repair view if the action or process being charged
00:34:47.160with harm is also responsible for creating the harmed agent. According to this objection,
00:34:53.260there is no possible world or relevant counterfactual in which the agent is better off
00:34:58.780without the harming action. Because every world in which the harming action does not exist
00:35:04.520is a world in which the agent who claims they were harmed does not exist either.
00:35:09.820End quote. And I'd really like to recognize the incredibly messy and imperfect work of navigating reparations for world-making processes, like the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism. What are the sort of fundamental limitations of our understanding of reparations? Or perhaps how does the magnitude of these ontologies inform the scope of our actions?
00:35:38.700Yeah, I think that's a really critical point, right?
00:35:42.920So one way to think about what reparations is supposed to do is to respond to the harm that was created by the past injustice.
00:35:55.140And what you just read summarized what philosophers call the counterfactual worry or the non-identity objection.
00:36:02.940And that's just the idea that how can you say that something has harmed you if you owe your existence to that thing?
00:36:13.900One of the things that is most interesting to me about the idea that transatlantic slavery and colonialism built the world, which I think is simply true, is that from that perspective, those kinds of comparisons cease to make sense anymore, right?
00:36:36.000How do you make reparations on that view of what reparations would be for the United States when the United States owes its existence to settler colonialism, the taking of land from the indigenous peoples of this continent, and the slave trade with which the country was built, right?
00:37:03.860If you take those things away, there's no U.S. anymore to have a level of welfare to compare the present, the status quo to, right?
00:37:23.280the world the fact that there is global trade the fact that there is a global economy the fact that
00:37:32.800there is a united nations owes itself to political conditions which arose out of
00:37:39.520these very interactions which we're trying to make reparations for
00:37:44.500and that scale should impress us when we're looking backwards but as you
00:37:50.360said in your question, I think very perceptively, if we're looking forward, we could have a scale
00:37:56.920problem of a similar kind. If the project we take on is rebuilding the world, what does that even
00:38:05.600mean? Can we have any of the same institutions that we have now and say that we've rebuilt the
00:38:12.500world? Can we have any of the same basic relationships that we have now and say that
00:38:17.360we've rebuilt the world? What all do we have to call in the question? My view is less an answer
00:38:25.140to those questions than an insistence that those are the questions to answer, rather than the kind
00:38:32.140of backward-looking questions about what would make up for these unspeakable horrors out of which
00:38:40.560the world was built. I think I'm trying to change the subject from the question of how do we
00:38:51.060make it as if those horrors didn't happen, which I don't think is possible, to
00:38:59.920a different question entirely of, well, now that we're in this world, now that there is a world,
00:39:09.520a planet-sized system of economy and politics,
00:39:13.800now how is it that we're going to protect each other?
00:39:17.780How is it that we're going to respond to harm,
00:39:21.300which I think is a world-making question
00:39:24.260that prison and police abolitionists are asking.
00:39:29.500How is it that we're going to secure people's access
00:39:34.400to food, to water, to shelter, to energy?
00:39:39.520Given the constraints of what we need to accomplish in the future, meeting emissions targets, preventing mass displacement, preventing climate apartheid,
00:39:55.780preventing climate colonialism? How are we going to respond to the harms of 2050,
00:40:02.6402060, and 2070, rather than the harms of 1619 or 1776 or 1865?
00:40:14.120I think that perspective doesn't ignore the past, but says what our relationship to the past
00:40:22.140ought to be, which is setting the terms for what we should do in the future, setting up the situation
00:40:29.900that we have to succeed or fail in responding to from the standpoint of justice. And that's the
00:40:36.840perspective that I've learned from reading other people and that I'm advocating. Yeah, thinking
00:40:45.640about reparations leads to so many wormholes, complications, and possibilities, but I don't
00:40:52.640want us to stray too far from the reality of what they could provide. So perhaps we can ground down
00:40:59.160in a few examples of what climate reparations could tangibly look like. What kind of projects
00:41:05.220do you imagine when climate reparations are used as a framework for the future,
00:41:09.220And how is global distribution radically reimagined?
00:41:14.180So one of the easiest things to say about what climate reparations would look like, what reparations from a kind of climate informed perspective would look like, is to just point at the Green Climate Fund.
00:41:32.180Imagine if we actually funded it instead of just saying that it exists. That would certainly not be the end of the story as far as what we need to do to make sure that there's justice in the world from a reparation standpoint.
00:41:48.300But it would go quite some distance. But I think a global distributive perspective lets us think of a framework, a sort of general framework, for how to make reparations and world making tangible.
00:42:10.300tangible. So what it is that I think about past injustice and the way that the world's been built
00:42:22.980is as itself a distribution system, right? So an important part of racial injustice is that it0.51
00:42:31.740means that systems function to make advantages pile up in white communities and disadvantages
00:42:38.740pile up in Black communities or Indigenous communities or the communities of other people
00:42:45.520of color. Things like universities, things like cultural capital, things like wealth,
00:42:55.500those all get concentrated in white communities. And things like incarceration, things like debt,0.80
00:43:04.780things like pollutants, literal environmental pollutants, all disproportionately get concentrated
00:43:12.840and accumulate in Black communities and Indigenous communities. And there's complicated stories to
00:43:20.520tell for each of these particular kinds of accumulation, why they accumulate where they
00:43:27.280accumulate, um, what specific institutional mechanisms are responsible for those accumulations,
00:43:35.640but it's still a useful perspective to think what racial injustice is, or an important aspect of
00:43:45.500what racial injustice is, is just the fact that there are these disproportionate strands of
00:43:52.740accumulation. And if we can pay attention to that, we can give a story, we can give a framework for
00:44:03.020what reparations would look like in those same kinds of terms. So in the Movement for Black Lives
00:44:10.840Policy Platform, one of the things that's advocated there is an invest-divest approach,1.00
00:44:16.540which I think is just exactly right, just dead on in terms of the kind of thinking
00:44:21.620that we would want to do to address these problems from a comprehensive standpoint.
00:44:28.260The idea is that our systems, the world systems that we've inherited from this unjust past
00:44:36.300that built our world, function to let bad things accumulate in the wrong places
00:44:43.540and to let good things accumulate in the wrong places.
00:44:47.640And the more we can address those kinds, patterns of accumulation directly, the better we'll do from the standpoint of racial justice.
00:45:01.540So the kind of divestment campaigns that are part and parcel of defund the police movements, for example, and that are also part and parcel of climate justice movements, say, divesting from fossil fuels, that kind of tactic is the sort of thing that looks like what we would have to do on a big scale in general.
00:45:29.140You know, from this framework, they're doing the same kind of thing when it comes to racial justice. They're addressing patterns of distribution in and of themselves. And I think that kind of thinking is going to give us more concrete things to say about what pursuing racial justice on a sort of reparations framework looks like.
00:45:53.780What parts of our economy, what parts of our political system have too many resources?
00:46:02.680What parts of our political system have too few and why?
00:46:06.400Why is it that we have a military in the United States, for example, that consumes more social resources than the next 10 militaries of the world combined, while we don't have health care for everyone?
00:46:23.420why is it on that same token that we don't tax wealth that trillions of dollars accumulate in
00:46:38.480tax havens but we can't give everyone a decent education and we can only find money to police
00:46:46.480and imprison people. I think those intervening in those distributions and tying surplus over
00:46:56.860there to lack over there, I think those kinds of tactics, those kinds of ways of thinking
00:47:07.080are what we need to cultivate if we're going to respond to this.
00:48:16.480We mentioned the Green New Deal earlier, and I'd like to return to it in terms of the possibility and limitations of green jobs, which might very well be a part of climate reparations.
00:48:29.500And I'm thinking specifically about the legacy and history behind the term just transition.
00:48:36.080Where does a just transition fit in terms of climate reparations and climate colonialism?
00:48:41.140What will meaningful work mean in this country in the next couple of years? And if there is a just transition to be had in terms of a Green New Deal and the implementation of green jobs, how can we make sure this is done outside of the grasp of corporate power? And can this be done without continuing to serve the interests of the elites?
00:49:03.060yeah in a lot of ways that is the question i think that a just transition is an important part
00:49:14.480of reparations because otherwise there's a bunch of people who aren't themselves at fault who are
00:49:25.980going to be in the crossfire when we hopefully win these other battles to move social resources
00:49:34.580from one part of our political system to another part, right? So if money comes out of the military,
00:49:42.800there's a lot of people who are employed by the military industrial complex who are going to have
00:49:51.180to do something else, right? If prisons are shut down, there's a lot of people who are COs who are
00:49:56.960going to have to do something else. If fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel extraction is shut down,
00:50:05.480there's a lot of people who are working in those industries or around those industries who are
00:50:11.740going to have to do something else. And the point isn't to blame those people for being in those
00:50:17.840industries, which they didn't create and they don't run, right? The idea is finding different
00:50:25.760ways to take care of all of us and ways that respond to the historical injustices that are
00:50:32.820built into our present system. The idea of a just transition, I think, would involve green jobs,
00:50:42.200the creation of green jobs. But I think what it also would need to involve from this standpoint
00:50:47.120is not just jobs, but the right to unionize in those jobs,
00:50:57.480increase in union density through those jobs,
00:51:03.120and a labor movement that is pushing for a just transition
00:51:09.880and all the forms of justice that come along with that just transition.
00:51:15.340And one of the things that I'm in particular encouraged by is something that unions around the country are doing, which they're calling the bargaining for the common good framework.
00:51:30.440and that's when they use the bargaining table and contract expiration to put more things on
00:51:42.780the table than just wages and benefits for the people in the union they fight for those things
00:51:48.840as well but they also include community organizations and communities themselves
00:51:55.900in figuring out what should be bargained over and also in bargaining for those demands.
00:52:04.700So the Chicago Teachers Union, for example, famously used this approach,
00:52:11.160working not only for their working conditions, but the working conditions of other public sector workers
00:52:18.820and also the living conditions of the students.
00:52:21.220So I think that kind of approach could make labor more powerful. It could make the labor movement more relevant to a broader way of thinking about justice. And it could provide a meaningful answer to the kind of elite domination of the relevant aspects of our political system.
00:52:44.860there's something else that you've written about that i'm extremely interested in and that's
00:52:54.040identity politics and how they're failing us and i really like to explore this a bit with you
00:53:00.380because i think too often those who criticize identity politics fail to recognize its origins
00:53:06.740or they abruptly dismiss it altogether and because of an underlying discomfort
00:53:12.240most likely with their own privilege. Now, you point out that the term identity politics
00:53:18.040was popularized in the 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective. And so I wonder if
00:53:24.800you can speak a bit about how identity politics are being misused and how we can identify when
00:53:32.000they're being deployed in the interest of elite power, whether it is in terms of climate,
00:53:37.360colonialism, political opportunity, etc. Yeah, identity politics has been on my mind a lot
00:53:47.180in the past few years, because I'm unambiguously committed to it. A lot of my research stems from
00:53:56.820the Black radical tradition, I consider myself a Pan-Africanist, you know, I just
00:54:02.540am on the team. I'm on team identity politics. But nevertheless, I find a lot of the behavior
00:54:10.620associated with identity politics, or I guess I should say a lot of the political commitments
00:54:15.500associated with identity politics frustrating in a variety of ways. And the piece I wrote was
00:54:23.440trying to think about how much of the stuff that I'm seeing on social media is really built into
00:54:30.600identity politics and how much of it is just different trends that someone could be in favor
00:54:39.420of identity politics without necessarily joining up with. And so the Comedy River Collective was
00:54:45.900an organization of queer black feminist socialists. And they published a manifesto
00:54:53.840and they were doing a lot of work with a variety of organizations, which included consciousness
00:55:00.880raising, which included protesting, which included a lot of radical activity. And Barbara Smith,
00:55:08.800who was one of the original founders of the group, recently wrote some articles. There was an op-ed
00:55:16.400and the guardian there was an interview um and she wanted to clarify that at least what
00:55:22.980she meant at the time and what they meant at the time was compatible with working
00:55:28.960um towards common problems with people in coalition so people who weren't necessarily
00:55:36.540of your particular identity, right? Queer, Black, feminist, socialist, that's a specific
00:55:46.260group of people, right? There might be some people who you align with in some ways and
00:55:51.080not in other ways, right? But that was fine, according to Smith, and that was compatible
00:55:57.700with identity politics. So what is the problem with identity politics, or what's different
00:56:04.680in any event, about the kind of identity politics that's popular now versus the kind that was
00:56:12.460envisioned by the collective. I think one of the things that's different
00:56:17.780is this phenomenon that I've been calling elite capture. And by elite capture, I just mean
00:56:25.360when the most advantaged people in a group get a hold of the resources or the political agenda
00:56:35.600or the narrative about a group, especially a marginalized group. And so from that perspective,
00:56:47.400one of the things that's happened is that the jargon, the modes of reasoning, the kinds of
00:56:54.700political aesthetics that circulate nowadays around identity politics, I think often reflect
00:57:05.440the schedule of concerns of the most advantaged people in a group, which isn't to say that those
00:57:15.320concerns don't matter, right? But it's just to point out that they may not be reflective
00:57:24.660of what the group needs as a whole. Well, bringing up the notion of elite capture,
00:57:33.300I think for many listeners will conjure up questions and feelings about the possibility
00:57:38.120of an elite free world. Now, in my opinion, we're somewhat losing momentum as criticisms of the so
00:57:45.140called ruling class become more mainstream you know it's a catchy slogan it's it's a good meme
00:57:50.700but i'm not sure how many of us are really imagining organizing a world without elite
00:57:56.380interest or corporate structure or willing to experience the birthing pains that are required
00:58:02.380to obtain it so i'm interested in hearing your thoughts on this and how we need to be organizing
00:58:08.600or orienting ourselves to the reality that the elite are not going to willingly abandon self
00:58:14.960interest. It's interesting that you put it the way that you did in terms of an elite free world.
00:58:25.260And one of the things that's been most interesting to me about certain kinds of elite capture
00:58:33.180of identity politics in particular, is that some of the uses of identity politics
00:58:40.380militate against there being an elite free world, in fact, are fully invested in there being elites.
00:58:49.100And they use identity politics to highlight unfairnesses about who is an elite and which
00:59:00.240elites can get away with what? You know, a telling example is the criticism of people who
00:59:12.060called out Kamala Harris's prosecutorial record, right? The idea was that perhaps
00:59:20.520a white prosecutor like Amy Klobuchar faced less criticism for presumably similar
00:59:29.860conduct than Harris did. And the role of identity politics and that kind of criticism
00:59:37.720is essentially to say that it's unfair that Klobuchar gets to profit in a professional sense
00:59:53.840off of being a prosecutor and relating in a way mediated by a racist criminal justice system
01:00:02.640to the lives of working class black and brown people in a way that Harris is excluded from
01:00:09.720profiting off of. And that seems to me to be a kind of identity politics that I have no personal
01:00:19.220interest in, but a revealing kind of identity politics from the perspective of how we relate
01:00:27.580to elites generally. I think what we should think about in terms of elite capture, in terms of
01:00:36.020building kinds of politics that respond to the fact that elites have incredible amounts of
01:00:45.580control over our social institutions, over our attention now through social media, over
01:00:52.240our access to basic kinds of security. What we need to do, I think, is develop an orientation
01:01:02.160towards building power. So one of the things I've been talking about and thinking about with other
01:01:10.400people is the idea of different forms of governance that build power for communities.
01:01:20.360So there are a variety of people talking about ideas like community control over police,
01:01:27.580for example, talking about community land trusts, talking about things that increase
01:01:34.520the power of ordinary people over the things that determine the outcome of their lives.
01:01:42.380And we should pair those with the kinds of things that perhaps we're more used to thinking about,
01:01:48.040antitrust struggles against big tech, struggles against fossil fuel companies for divestment
01:01:54.780or for holding executives to criminal charges for their role in climate misinformation.
01:02:02.160but the idea is the balance of power between us and them will determine what happens politically
01:02:10.700and so there's a role both for reducing the power of elites and increasing the power of
01:02:20.220non-elites and both of those things have to get done if we're going to have better political
01:02:28.220conditions. And so there's a long-term conversation about whether or not there should be elites.
01:02:34.560But I think a conversation we can have right now is what we think of the balance of power between
01:02:40.860elites and the rest of the world, and what we can do in concrete and measurable senses to change
01:02:46.900that balance of power. Yeah. Well, right now, especially, it feels as if we are witnessing
01:02:57.140the American psyche experience a great denial.
01:03:00.720I've read several of your articles reflecting on attitudes around COVID in the United States,
01:03:06.200how the state responds to disaster, and the trajectory of climate denial.
01:03:11.100So what stage of denial do you think the United States is in, and is there a time to get out?
01:03:20.460I think the U.S. as a whole is somewhere between the bargaining and anger stages of grief, right?
01:03:29.680Where I think about the response to things like the 1619 Project, for example.
01:03:39.960And you have, especially on social media, a whole torrent of culture war-like responses from people.
01:03:48.540And eventually, even the White House gets involved and there's federal bans on what kinds of trainings federal employees can receive and whether or not they mention systemic racism.
01:04:04.480and it's in situations like these where I find it hardest to jump out of the mindset of someone who
01:04:14.820studies race for a living because from the mindset of someone who studies race for a living
01:04:22.020it's very difficult to track what's going on right the US's investment in
01:07:26.520our political outcomes are going to be determined
01:07:29.940by who wins contests of various kinds,
01:07:34.540contests of wills, contests over legislation,
01:07:37.800contests over contracts, contests over regulations, the sorts of pushes and pulls
01:07:45.820that build our social structure. And I think some amount of preaching to the choir is going to be
01:07:54.240involved. Another thing that I think, because of where I grew up and how I grew up, is that
01:08:01.780there's just some people who will never accept that there are things wrong with the US, that it
01:08:10.760was complicit with certain kinds of injustices, that they owe their position in life and their
01:08:18.620advantages to those injustices. There are people who won't come to that conclusion, irrespective
01:08:28.580of what we do and how we relate to them. And I think it's important that we make our peace with
01:08:33.940this. And there are some things that we should just address to those people who will. And perhaps
01:08:42.040some of these truths, some of these political perspectives are better reserved for
01:08:50.220the people who are willing to take a second look at some of these issues.
01:08:55.280mm-hmm well alafemi i'd like to thank you for taking the time to discuss some of these
01:09:02.740very conceptual and gravely important issues with me and as we come to a close i'd like to ask you
01:09:10.380a personal question which is what do you do with all of this knowledge and how do you feel empowered
01:09:17.940to withstand the waves of paralysis that are becoming more prevalent
01:09:22.060that's a great question what do i do um
01:09:29.020i think the broad perspective that i have
01:09:37.200is a very practically focused perspective right there's a lot of theoretical things that i think
01:09:48.000There's a lot of opinions I have about, you know, history and theory and counterfactuals and all that stuff.
01:09:59.100But ultimately, the point of doing that is to decide what to do, decide how to act in the world.
01:10:07.680And I think that perspective, the idea that we're trying to change the world and not just to understand it, I think there's something in that perspective that isn't quite optimism, right?
01:10:30.440Like if you asked me how likely I think it is that we're going to face genocide by the end of the century, I'd give you a very pessimistic sounding answer.
01:10:44.760If you ask me to rate the chances that we achieve justice in my generation or the following generation, I'd give you a similarly pessimistic sort of answer.
01:10:54.820so it's not that having a practical perspective makes it impossible for me to think that things
01:11:07.320are going very badly but there's a way that it just changes the subject because I've decided
01:11:15.720that I want to do what I can with what's available to me in the situation that I'm in
01:11:21.880I just don't ask the question very often, how likely is it that we'll succeed?
01:11:31.860I just skip to the question of what should I do given what the situation is like?
01:11:43.260What deserves my time and attention, given what's possible, given what I can meaningfully affect, given what the group I'm in can meaningfully affect?
01:11:56.340I think getting involved and taking action builds something that functions a lot like hope in us.
01:12:06.540And if I had to describe what that thing was, the closest word I can come to is acceptance.
01:12:15.240I just accept, I just understand that the odds are dire.
01:12:20.240But by confronting those odds, I've already decided that the odds are good enough that I'm going to keep going.
01:12:29.160and I can't say that that perspective stops me from being kept up at night I can't say that
01:12:40.140that perspective gives me a rosy picture of the world I can't say that I don't struggle with
01:12:48.200depression because of or partially because of the things that I study and think about
01:12:54.440But I can say that there's a kind of despair that gets taken off the table by that way of relating to the world.
01:13:08.520whatever the world is like I'm going to suit up and I'm going to join the people who are on my
01:13:15.500team and together we're going to do whatever it is that's left for us to do even if that is just
01:13:23.720to fail with dignity that's still something that I can reach for that I can try to achieve and that
01:13:29.000we can try to achieve and I think that perspective unlocks a lot of possibility