Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism

(Paperback, New edition)

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A pathbreaking book about world history, global justice, colonialism, and the climate

"Coursing with moral urgency and propelled by brilliant prose, this is more than argument. It's how we build the power needed to win."
-Naomi Klein

A clear, new case for reparations as a "constructive," future-oriented project that responds to the weight of history's injustices with the equitable distribution of benefits and burdens. Centuries ago, Tw explains, European powers engineered the systems through which advantages and disadvantages still flow. Colonialism and transatlantic slavery forged schemes of injustice on an unprecedented scale, a world order he calls "global racial empire." The project of justice must meet the same scope.

This understanding, Tw shows, has deep roots in the thought of Black political thinkers such as James Baldwin, Martin Luther King, Jr., Cedric Robinson, and Nkechi Taifa.

Reconsidering Reparations is a book with profound implications for our views of justice, racism, the legacies of slavery and colonialism, and climate change policy.

Reviews

"Weaving together the long-held redistribution demands of revolutionary movements for racial justice and decolonization with the scientific imperative for immediate climate action, Olfmi O. Tw builds the irresistible case for decarbonization through reparation. Coursing with moral urgency and propelled by brilliant prose, this is more than argument. It's how we build the power needed to win."

--Naomi Klein, author of Doppelganger

" Reconsidering Reparations is an essential book for anyone who wants a better world. Olfmi O. Tw's argument for reparations as a construction project is urgent in the times we are facing. Tw makes clear the connections between colonialism and the climate crisis in a way that is both rigorously backed with research and extremely practical. This is a book I devoured the first time I read it and have revisited again and again since. Olfmi O. Tw's work is transformational."

--Mikaela Loach, author of It's Not That Radical

"In this sweeping, subtle, and sophisticated analysis, Olfmi O. Tw presents an iron-clad case for why colonialism's end must coincide with a reparative transformation in relations between the colonizer and colonized, in the Global North and South. It's required reading for anyone looking for the arguments to support a just, and healing, future."

--Raj Patel

"This is the rare book of moral, economic, and political philosophy that has urgent, real-world stakes and implications. Olfmi O. Tw's incisive and visionary accounting reveals that meaningful reparations are less about tallying debts and credits and apportioning blame than forging new communities and building a more livable world. This insightful book can help us chart a path toward a democratic, decarbonized, and decolonized future we all need and deserve."

--Astra Taylor, author of Remake the World

"In this forcefully argued book, Olfmi O. Tw grounds the case for reparations in a sweeping yet synthetic account of the historical origins of our starkly unequal world order. Weaving together multiple traditions of radical thought and attuned to the most pressing debates of our moment, Tw reveals reparations to be world-making in two potent senses of the term."

--Thea Riofrancos

"Illuminating... Calling upon intellectual legacies far beyond the analytic canon--from anticolonial activists to the Black radical tradition to legal scholarship to lessons from the nineteenth-century Mal slave rebellion in the Empire of Brazil--Tw returns the discourse on reparations to its rightful, radical roots... His work is a particularly welcome salve to tired debates about race, class, and identity politics."

--Natasha Lennard, Bookforum

"Though Reconsidering Reparations focuses on histories of unequal distribution, its highlight is the climate justice chapters."

--Ankushi Mitra and Lahra Smith, Washington Post

Author Bio

Olfmi O. Tw is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University and the author of the critically acclaimed book Elite Capture. His public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been featured in The New Yorker, Hammer & Hope (where he is a member of the Editorial Team), The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, The Appeal, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, Aeon, and Foreign Policy. He lives in Washington D.C.