Reconsidering Reparations - by Olúfẹ & ́ & mi O Táíwò (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

A pathbreaking book about world history, global justice, and the climate crisis-featuring a new preface by the author.

"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, Táíwò 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.

Táíwò's analysis not only discourages despair, it demands global resistance. Reconsidering Reparations suggests policies, goals, and organizing strategies. And it leaves readers with clear and powerful advice: act like an ancestor. Do what we can to shape the world we want our moral descendants to inherit, and have faith that they will continue the long struggle for justice. This understanding, Táíwò 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.

Review Quotes

"Weaving together the long-held redistribution demands of revolutionary movements for racial justice and decolonization with the scientific imperative for immediate climate action, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò 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

"Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò Reconsidering Reparations is an urgent and eloquent reflection on our agency as moral beings, asking the related questions of what can we do about the past and how we can make for a better future? It is full of brilliant insight and complexities, but this book's most essential lesson can be distilled in one phrase, a powerful summons: beware in all that we do, that we, too, are ancestors."
-Howard W. French, author, Born in Blackness

"In Reconsidering Reparations, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò writes, 'Our prognosis is bleak if... political decisions are left to the great powers that have shaped the present moment and today's climate crisis.' But in this pathbreaking work, Táíwò offers a map for how international movements for justice can reclaim and repair our broken world."
-Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation

"Reconsidering Reparations is an essential book for anyone who wants a better world. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's argument for reparations as a construction project is urgent in the times we are facing. Táíwò 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. Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò's work is transformational."
-Mikaela Loach, author of It's Not That Radical

"While close reading history, philosophy and journalism, Reconsidering Reparations zooms out from contemporary debates so that readers can see how the case for reparations extends beyond the year 1619 and the boundaries of the United States, urging us to include indigenous peoples throughout the Americas, the colonization of Africa, and 'global racial empire' in our thinking. In this imminently readable yet philosophically substantial book, Olúfẹ́!mi O. Táíwò gives readers a constructivist framework for imagining relationships of repair into being. With a thrilling economy of language which matches Táíwò's equally brilliant Elite Capture, this slim volume packs a punch as powerfully as a knockout from Muhammad Ali."
-Steven W. Thrasher, author of The Viral Underclass

"In Reconsidering Reparations, Taiwo challenges and dismantles the dominant narratives about the world we live in and how it was built-and for whom. In so doing, he unveils a brave and bulletproof case for climate reparations as not only the moral solution, but as the only logical solution. Still, as he reminds us that all of the systems that have brought us to this crisis-point have been man-made, he manages to make the task of repair look not only possible, but desirable. Exciting, even. If you care about this world and the remaking of it, this book is a must-read."
-Mary Annaïse Heglar, author of Troubled Waters and The World is Ours to Cherish

"In this sweeping, subtle, and sophisticated analysis, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò 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