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Ayana Young  Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. 

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  Can we have any of the same institutions that we have now and say that we've rebuilt the world? Can we have any of the same basic relationships that we have now and say that we've rebuilt the world?

Ayana Young  Olúfẹ́mi is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He studies and teaches social and political philosophy, with an emphasis on the Black radical tradition and anti-colonial thought. Olúfẹ́mi is currently writing a book entitled Reconsidering Reparations that considers a novel philosophical argument for reparations and explores links with environmental justice. He also is committed to public engagement and is publishing articles in popular outlets with general readership exploring intersections between climate justice and colonialism.

Well Olúfẹ́mi, thank you so much for joining us on the Podcast today, I'm really looking forward to diving into these topics that you just really push the edges of, it's refreshing and exciting to be talking about these themes in this way with you.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  Thanks a lot. I'm excited to be here.

Ayana Young  Well Olúfẹ́mi, I initially came across your work through your article “The Green New Deal and the Danger of Climate Colonialism” and so I’d like to begin our conversation by sort of breaking down what climate colonialism means for listeners. As a scholar of colonialism, how do you see national pursuits of green energy, through proposed legislation like the Green New Deal, potentially echoing colonialism under the guise of sustainable development and carbon offsets?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò So the basic standpoint that I have on colonialism kind of involves a different sort of stance, a different framework on what colonialism is to begin with before you can talk about climate colonialism. I think what most people imagine, you know, even myself before I started studying this intensely, what most people imagine when they think of colonialism is somebody showing up with a flag and planting it on some territory and saying, This belongs to the queen or the king. And obviously, that has something to do with colonialism. But that's not the whole story about what colonialism is. 

So what is colonialism? At its base, at its root, colonialism, if you look at prominent anti-colonial activists and fighters like Amílcar Cabral, they think of colonialism as the control of a culture and economy by a foreign power. And 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. And so when we think of colonialism, we should think of broadly foreign control of social life, which includes our economy, how we produce things, but also includes how we relate to each other, how we move on in the world, how what kind of art we produce, what kind of thinking we do so on so forth. 

And until actually, quite recently in history, much of colonial domination was of the very explicit flag planting variety. So in 1946, for example, just after the Second World War, there were only 35 member states in the United Nations, because much of the world was under the control of, you know, some of those states. But after the Second World War, there was a wave of anti-colonial movements, concentrated in Africa and Asia and by 1970, the number of independent countries had increased to 127 which gives you a sense of how much of the world was under the explicit formal domination of some other part of the world. From there, what happened afterwards some people characterize as neocolonialism. So there were multinational institutions like the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, there were treaty arrangements between different countries and the so called developed world, and the so called developing world. And there were corporate arrangements to either maintain or create new arrangements of control. And you put all those things together and you get a system, which people like Ghana's first prime minister, Nkrumah, called neocolonialism. And it's this sense, this kind of colonialism that makes the most sense of how something like the Green New Deal or climate policy generally could fit into neocolonialism. If the way that, for example, a large country and a large emitting country like the United States decides to produce climate targets, puts pressures, stated or unstated, on the developing countries of the world, whether it's for their resources, like lithium, which is commonly used and electric batteries, or whether it's their climate policy more generally, if the US, for example, doesn't set ambitious enough emissions target and eats up most of the world's carbon budget. These are ways that the policies and the social life of places near and far from the United States could be dominated by what the United States does in legislation, like the Green New Deal, or what it fails to do.

Ayana Young  I'm wondering how do climate justice movements avoid repeating this history?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  That's a complicated question. And I think it involves a number of approaches. And I think it involves a number of kinds of targets. 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, right, so a movement based on something like solidarity in the way that, for example, unions are organized workers relate to each other. That's a kind of basic model for how we should relate to each other in politics. And I think, quite generally in social life, right. And so, environmentalist groups based in the global north, or the first world or the rich countries of 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. 

But 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. And 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, they're 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. And 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. 

Ayana Young  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. Can you share with us what role the financial crisis of the 2000s had in catalyzing agricultural land acquisition abroad? 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?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  Yeah, 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. 

So 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. That's when major financial institutions like the Lehman Brothers were on the ropes and the world's monetary system was at risk. One 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. And partially because of that, and partially because of a kind of long standing vulnerability of land, especially in the global south to transnational capital, there was what some researchers call a global land rush. 

So there was a large surge of land acquisition, especially in the global south, and very much, especially on the African continent. By some estimates, the rate of land expansion was increased by 20 times compared to before the crisis. And also, by another estimate, something like a quarter of the available arable land on the African continent was bought up by large scale land acquisition as capital moved around the globe. And what that means functionally speaking, is that a lot of the land, and a lot of the political control over land is in the hands of a few very rich people, whether they're fund managers of some kind, or whether they're Indigenous elites, on the African continent. But their bottom line, their interests, are going to be quite different from the interests of African people in general, they're going to be quite different from the interests of the masses of people anywhere on the planet in general, and what 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. And 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.

Ayana Young  Yeah, it makes me wonder what countries are being targeted and why, and so 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. Like, 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 I'd love for you to expand on that, if you would.

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  Yeah. So the short answer is not enough, is being done to protect the people in this part of the world, especially by comparison to how much is being done to protect the elites who own the land, that they would need to be managed in a public and community centered way if they're going to get through the climate crises and the impacts of climate crisis as they accelerate over the next part of this century. Part of the story here is that the kinds of ownership of land, sort of private ownership deeded ownership, often held by an individual person or perhaps an individual group of people as opposed to managed in common by a coalition of community members. Not every kind of ownership of land is recognized the same way by the market. So you might have a situation where Indigenous groups or a sort of consortium of ethnic groups maybe or just various communities, however you'd like to describe them are accustomed to living and working and engaging with the land in a certain way. But it may not be the case that a particular person has a deed from the government saying that they're allowed to do so. Right, the establishment of record keeping and the maintenance of record keeping of this kind, and the recognition of record keeping practices of ways of sharing the land that were proliferated by colonialism by the British Empire, the French Empire, the Portuguese Empire, didn't necessarily recognize all those varied ways that people can relate to land and people can relate to rights to land. 

So what that what that amounts to is there's a sort of political vulnerability, when capitalism is as mobile as it is across state borders, and can buy the titles for lands, whether or not those titles, those legal documents correspond to how people have actually been using the land, or what rights over the land people recognize an individual or groups of people is having so on, so forth. So I think that's part and parcel of the problem here. 

But in terms of what's being done for the people who say, live on the African continent, or live in the quilombos of Brazil, or who live in any part of the world that's being targeted by land acquisition, and that is at risk of displacement led by climate events. What's being done overwhelmingly, is the intensification of draconian border policies. So the concentration camps in the United States on the southern border, for example, is the United States's response to the climate crisis in parts of the world like Guatemala, which already have people fleeing conditions that climate crisis have contributed typically, on the positive side that there are some multinational instruments like the Green Climate Fund, that is supposed to provide a way for richer countries to dedicate money and resources towards green developments for developing countries. But the targets set for raising money, by some researchers' estimates in the first place, were too low. And the amount of money that has actually been raised for the Green Climate Fund hasn't even met that meager target. And so, right now, there is a lot more social resources being put towards the extraction of resources and the profit that resource access makes possible, and to the punitive policing of people who are trying to now flee the worst impacts of climate crisis and the preparation of the draconian policy for the people who will in the future be trying to do to avoid the worst impacts of climate crisis.

Ayana Young  You’ve pointed out that there is tension amongst environmentalists when it comes to carbon capture, with some very prominent environmental groups advocating that carbon removal be withheld from any Green New Deal...but when I think about the glaring inequalities between the countries that have contributed to the vast majority of global emissions versus the countries that are already experiencing the ramifications, it feels cruel to shut this conversation down altogether. How should we think about carbon capture in terms of, as you put it, “rectifying historical climate injustices”? What needs to be centered in the development of carbon removal strategies?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  I think people are worried about carbon removal for two reasons that are, I think, very intelligent responses to some serious problems with carbon removal. So first, people are very rightly suspicious of who they've been seeing advocate for carbon removal. Some of the best resourced advocates for carbon removal are fossil fuel companies who favor approaches like enhanced oil recovery, which ultimately conserve their bottom line quite easily. And since they are the best resourced, they are also the people that folks have likely heard from on the issue of carbon removal. So that suspicion, I think, is very warranted. 

Secondly, people are concerned that the development of carbon removal would serve as a kind of moral hazard or a blank check that would justify and excuse future emissions. So, you know, as I've been trying to stress, I think these are very good reasons to be dubious about just any version of advocating for carbon removal. But at the same time, I think what you said is also accurate, right? We're, in the United States, for example, very disproportionately responsible for the cumulative emissions over the last century and a half or so that drive the climate crisis. And so after having polluted the planet that we all live and breathe in, to that extent, from a justice perspective, it doesn't make sense to me to wash our hands of our past emissions, and refuse to develop carbon removal technologies or refuse to deploy carbon removal technologies. 

And I think what's crucial about the way I said it just now is a difference in framework from one way of thinking about carbon removal technologies, which I think people rightfully identify as problematic, and maybe a different way, an alternative way that better situates it from the standpoint of justice. 

So if you think what carbon removal is about is about clearing the way for future emissions, right, if it's future oriented, if it's a thing that we do, so that we can keep business as usual going with respect to burning fossil fuels and continuing to emit at an unsustainable pace, then absolutely, you should oppose that approach to the climate crisis. And if that's what carbon removal means for some people, then they are absolutely getting something wrong, right. There's no path forward that is sustainable, that is at all compatible with justice, that doesn't involve significantly scaling back our future emissions. But if you think of carbon removal, not as a blank check for the future, but as a sort of reparations, check for the past, right as sort of a response to past years of emissions which have built up in the atmosphere. I think from that perspective, it's not only obvious that, especially global north richer nations should be investing in carbon removal research and deployment. But it's, I think, obvious that they have to, from a perspective of justice, the best science of which I'm aware, the IPCC, for example, the models that show what's necessary for preventing the worst impacts of climate crisis, almost all seem to include some use of carbon removal on a gigaton scale, which is billions of times. That's a lot of carbon removal. Right. So that suggests that we have to do some research there, we have to do some deployment there. If that's the case, then the moral question about carbon removal is better addressed to how to distribute the burdens and benefits of carbon removal, rather than the question of whether or not to do carbon removal. Because regardless of whether or not it's going to give us the wrong idea, the driving thing is how the ecosystem will respond to the presence or absence of carbon.

So I think the better framework for carbon removal is a justice framework where we instead ask the question, “Who should bear the burdens of rolling this out and researching it?” And I would say the global north, high emitting countries, especially those high emitting countries that have a history of colonial domination, those countries and those corporates should be on the hook for developing and rolling out carbon removal.

Ayana Young  Yeah, I definitely agree with you on that and 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. How do you situate these two different types of repair and why is the conversation on climate reparations long overdue? 

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  So the distinction between harm repair and relationship repair are two different categories that you could use to think about reparations in general, but I think, especially reparations on a global scale, which is the scale I think you would have to think of, if you were thinking about reparations for things like transatlantic slavery and colonialism because these things just built world politics, right? They built the planet sized economic system and political system that we have. Harmed based repair is a way of thinking about reparations that says, “Well, some people in the world are worse off than they would have been, if it weren't for colonialism, if it weren't for the slave trade if it weren't for this level of emissions.” And I think that gets something important, right? Which is that what we should be thinking about, primarily, is how well off people are, whether or not people have what they need, whether they have food, water, shelter, those are the things that should drive how we think about these issues. 

But the comparison that it appeals to the comparison of the hypothetical case of how well off we'd be if it weren't for the slave trade, let's say, as opposed to how well off people would be, or people are given that there has been a slave trade. And I think that gets you into thorny waters and questions that are hard to answer about how you set up that hypothetical. And so partially to avoid those complications, some people started thinking about reparations in a different way all together. They thought, well, reparations is about fixing an injustice, but not in terms of welfare, but fixing an injustice in terms of our ongoing moral relationships to each other, based on the fact that this injustice happened, and the fact that it hasn't been addressed by something like reparations, and there's different ways to get back going. But 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? There's a variety of ways that we can do that. And 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. And to say it theoretically, I could say something that probably doesn't mean much to a lot of people, I 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 projects. So as we build that just world, how do we distribute the benefits and burdens? Who do we make do the hard things? Who do we make take on the sacrifices? Who gets the benefits of that transition? And so on so forth. 

That's all abstract, it perhaps doesn't mean much, but I think it means something very concrete if we're talking about staring in the face of climate crisis, so suppose we have a picture of the world that we think is just, maybe we think the whole world should be a set of democracies, maybe regional democracies, suppose we think we have a viewpoint of there should be a world government, for example, or maybe we think there should be a particular parliamentary system, maybe we think there should be a certain kind of distribution of income, right, we want a certain kind of tax structure, or a certain kind of job guarantee structure that works everywhere, just pick whatever your picture of justice is, right. And that's an important thing to have an opinion on what the just world looks like. I think regardless of what justice looks like to you, I doubt anyone would look at the world as we have it and say that we're there yet. So I think everyone would agree that it's going to take some time, getting from where the world is now in the status quo, to whatever the just version of the world is, whatever the good version of the world is. If all that you care about is eventually getting to the just world, then maybe you don't care about the inequalities that are going to be built into the suffering of the impending climate crisis. So long as by 2150, for example, we get to the just world. But suppose you, alright, suppose you think it matters, not just whether or not we eventually get justice, but it matters how we get there, then here's the thing you might find bracing, here's the thing that you might find unacceptable. The fact that on the current trajectory, which is something like four or even five degrees centigrade by the end of this, by the end of the century, large parts of global south cities, and predominantly Black and Indigenous parts of the world will be underwater, that something on the order of 140 million people will be displaced within their own countries, many more beyond the borders of their own countries, that the century to come might congeal into a system of climate apartheid, where the richest people within a country or community will be able to insulate themselves from the worst parts of climate crisis and where the least advantaged people in a community or country will be subject to wanton police violence, and material insecurity. You might find all that unacceptable. And you might find it unacceptable whether or not by 2150, those of us who are left have achieved the just world or just society. From that point of view, the transition costs, the justice of how we get to the just world from here, is very important. And that's the perspective that I think of. I call it the constructive view. It's something that I think was part and parcel of how people thought about justice during the anti-colonial movements of the 50s 60s and 70s, especially on the African continent. And it's a political perspective that I think we should return to. And that has a lot to tell us about how to achieve justice and what we should be looking for out of justice, in the response to the climate crisis.

Ayana Young  In a working draft of Reconsidering Reparations: The Movement for Black Lives and Self-Determination, you write; “Even had reparations been paid shortly after the abolition of slavery: how could one ‘repair’, say, whatever harm was done to a child born in the condition of slavery? For this individual’s life, there is no “before” to return to. Put generally: it may be impossible to make sense of an individual ‘harm’ claim on the repair view if the action or process being charged with harm is also responsible for creating the harmed agent. According to this objection, there is no possible world or relevant counterfactual in which the agent is better off without the harming action, because every world in which the harming action does not exist is a world in which the agent who claims they were harmed does not exist either.” 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?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  Yeah, I think that's a really critical point. Right? So one way to think about what reparations is supposed to do is to respond to the harm that was created by the past injustice. And what you just read summarized what philosophers call the counterfactual worry, or the non-identity objection. And that's just the idea that, how can you say that something has harmed you, if you owe your existence to that thing? 

One 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? How 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, if you take those things away, there's no U.S. anymore, to have a level of welfare to compare the present status quo to, right. We owe all those things, we owe the existence of this country to those things. And it's not just this country, the world, the fact that there is global trade, the fact that there is a global economy, the fact that there is a United Nations owes itself to political conditions, which arose out of these very interactions, which we're trying to make reparations for. 

And that scale should impress us when we're looking backwards. But as you said in your question, I think very perceptively, right? If we're looking forward, we could have a scale problem of a similar kind, right? If the project we take on as rebuilding the world, what does that even mean? Can we have any of the same institutions that we have now and say that we've rebuilt the world? Can we have any of the same basic relationships that we have now and say that we've rebuilt the world? What all do we have to call into question? My view is less than answer to those questions, then an insistence that those are the questions to answer, rather than the kind of backward looking questions about what would make up for these unspeakable horrors out of which the world was built? I think I'm trying to change the subject from the question of how do we, how do we make it as if those horrors didn't happen? Which I don't think it's possible to a different question entirely of “Well, now that we're in this world now that there is a world, a planet sized system of economy and politics. Now, how is it that we're going to protect each other? How is it that we're going to respond to harm?” Which I think is a world making question that prison and police abolition in us are asking? How is it that we're going to secure people's access to food, to water, to shelter, to energy, given the constraints of what we need to accomplish in the future, right, meeting emissions targets, right, preventing mass displacement, preventing climate apartheid, preventing climate colonialism? How are we going to respond to the harms of 2015, 2016 and 2017, rather than the harms of 1619, or 1776, or 1865.

I think that perspective doesn't ignore the past, but says what our relationship to the past ought to be, which is setting the terms for what we should do in the future, setting up the situation that we have to succeed or fail in responding to from the standpoint of justice. And that's the perspective that I've learned from reading other people. And that I'm advocating.

Ayana Young  Yeah, thinking about reparations leads to so many wormholes, complications, and possibilities - but I don’t want us to stray too far from the reality of what they could provide, so perhaps we can ground down in a few examples of what climate reparations could tangibly look like. What kind of projects do you imagine when climate reparations are used as a framework for the future? How is global distribution radically re-imagined? 

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  So 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 out the Green Climate Fund. Imagine 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, but it would go quite some distance. But I think a global distributive perspective allows us to think of a framework, a sort of general framework for how to make reparations and world-making tangible. 

So what it is that I think about past injustice, and the way that the world has been built is as itself a distribution system. Right? So an important part of racial injustice is that it means that systems function to make advantages pile up in white communities and disadvantages pile up in Black communities, or Indigenous communities are the communities of other people of color. Things like universities, things like cultural capital, things like wealth. Those all get concentrated in white communities. And things like incarceration, things like debt, things like pollutants, literal environmental pollutants, all disproportionately get concentrated, and accumulate in Black communities and Indigenous communities. And there's complicated stories to tell, for each of these particular kinds of accumulation, why they accumulate where they accumulate? What specific institutional mechanisms are responsible for those accumulations. But it's still a useful perspective, to think what racial injustice is, or an important aspect of what racial injustice is, is just the fact that there are these disproportionate strands of accumulation. And if we can pay attention to that, we can give a story, we can give a framework for what reparations would look like, in those same kinds of terms. 

So in the movement for Black Lives policy platform, one of the things that's advocated there is an invest divest approach, which I think is just exactly right, just dead on in terms of the kind of thinking that we would want to do to address these problems from a comprehensive standpoint. The idea is that our systems, the world systems that we've inherited from this unjust past that built our world function, to let bad things accumulate in the wrong places, and to let good things accumulate in the wrong places. And the more we can address those kinds of patterns of accumulation directly, the better we'll do from the standpoint of racial justice. So the kind of divestment campaigns that are part and parcel of defend 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, you 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. 

What parts of our economy, what parts of our political system have too many resources? What parts of our political system have too few? And why? Why 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 healthcare for everyone? Why is it on that same token, that we don't tax wealth, that trillions of dollars accumulate in tax havens. But we can't give everyone a decent education. And we can only find money to police and imprison people. I think those intervening in those distributions and tying surplus over there to lack over there, I think those kinds of tactics, those kinds of ways of thinking, or what we need to cultivate if we're gonna respond to this.

Ayana Young  We 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 [?]...And I’m thinking specifically about the legacy and history behind the term “just transition.” Where does a just transition fit in terms of climate reparations and climate colonialism? What 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? Can this be done without continuing to serve the interest of the elites?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  Yeah, in a lot of ways, that is the question. I think that a just transition is an important part of reparations, because otherwise, there's a bunch of people who aren't themselves at fault, who are going to be in the crossfire when we hopefully win these other battles to move social resources from one part of our political system to another part. Right? So if money comes out of the military, there's a lot of people who are employed by the military industrial complex, who are going to have to do something else right. If prisons are shut down, there's a lot of people who are COs who are gonna have to do something else. If fossil fuel companies and fossil fuel extraction is shut down, there's a lot of people who are working in those industries or around those industries who are going to have to do something else. And the point isn't to blame those people for being in those industries, which they didn't create, and they don't run, right. The idea is finding different ways to take care of all of us in ways that respond to the historical and justices that are built into our present system. 

The idea of a just transition, I think, would involve green jobs, the creation of green jobs. But I think what it also would need to involve from this standpoint, is not just jobs, but the right to unionize in those jobs, increase in union density through those jobs, and a labor movement that is pushing for a just transition. And all the forms of justice that come along with that just transition. And one of the things that I'm particularly encouraged by is something that unions around the country are doing, which they're calling the bargaining for the common good framework. And that's when they use the bargaining table, and contract expiration, to put more things on the table than just wages and benefits for the people in the union. They fight for those things as well. But they also include community organizations and communities themselves, in figuring out what should be bargained over, and also in bargaining for those demands. So the Chicago Teachers Union, for example, famously used this approach, working not only for their working conditions, but the working conditions of other public sector workers, and also the living conditions of the students. So 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.

Ayana Young  There is something else, Yyou’ve written about how identity politics are failing us, and I’d really like to explore this a bit with you, because I think too often those who criticize identity politics fail to recognize it’s origins or they abruptly dismiss it altogether, because of an underlying discomfort with their own privilege. You point out that the term “identity politics” was popularized in the 1977 manifesto of the Combahee River Collective,and so I wonder if you can speak a bit about how identity politics are being misused and how we can identify when they are being deployed in the interest of elite power; whether it is in terms of climate colonialism, political opportunity, etc.?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  Yeah, identity politics has been on my mind a lot in the past few years, because I'm unambiguously committed to it. A lot of my research stems from the Black Radical Tradition, I consider myself a pan-Africanist. I just am on the team. I'm on Team Identity Politics. But nevertheless, I find a lot of the behavior associated with identity politics, or I guess, I should say, a lot of the political commitments associated with identity politics, frustrating in a variety of ways. 

And the piece I wrote was trying to think about how much of the stuff that I'm seeing on social media is really built into identity politics, and how much of it is just different trends that someone could be in favor of identity politics without necessarily joining up with. And so the Combahee River Collective was an organization of queer Black feminists, socialists. And they published a manifesto and they were doing a lot of work with a variety of organizations, which included consciousness raising, which included protesting, which included a lot of radical activity. And Barbara Smith, who was one of the original founders of the group, recently wrote some articles, there was an op-ed in The Guardian, there was an interview. And she wanted to clarify at least what she meant at the time, and what they meant at the time, was compatible with working towards common problems with people in coalition. So people who weren't necessarily of your particular identity, right? Queer Black feminist socialists, that's a specific group of people, right? There might be some people who you allied with in some ways, and not in other ways. Right? But that was fine, according to Smith, and that was compatible with identity politics. So what is the problem with identity politics, or what's different In any event, about the kind of identity politics that's popular now versus the kind that was envisioned by the Collective? I think one of the things that's different is this phenomenon that I've been calling ‘elite capture’. And by elite capture, I just mean, when the most advantaged people in a group get a hold of the resources, or the political agenda, or the narrative, about a group, especially a marginalized group. And so from that perspective, one of the things that happened is that the jargon, the modes of reasoning, the kinds of political aesthetics that circulate nowadays, around identity politics, I think often reflect the schedule of concerns of the most advantaged people in a group, which isn't to say that those concerns don't matter, right? But it's just to point out that they may not be reflective of what the group needs as a whole.

Ayana Young  Bringing up the notion of elite capture, I think, for many listeners will conjure up questions and feelings about the possibility of an elite free world. In my opinion, we are somewhat losing momentum as criticisms of the so-called ruling class become more mainstream; it’s a catchy slogan, it’s a good meme - but I’m not sure how many of us are really imagining organizing a world without elite interest or corporate structure, or are willing to experience the birthing pains that are required to obtain it. I’m interested in hearing your thoughts on this and how we need to be organizing or orienting ourselves to the reality that the elite are not going to willingly abandon self interest?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  Interesting that you put it the way that you did in terms of an elite free world. And one of the things that's been most interesting to me about certain kinds of elite capture of identity politics in particular, is that some of the uses of identity politics militate against their being an elite free world, in fact, are fully invested in their being elites, and they use identity politics to highlight unfairness is about who is an elite and which elites can get away with what, you know. 

A telling example is the criticism of people who call it out Kamala Harris's prosecutorial record. Right? The idea was that perhaps a white prosecutor like Amy Klobuchar faced less criticism for presumably similar conduct than Harris did, and the role of identity politics and that kind of criticism is essentially to say that it's unfair, that Klobuchar gets to profit in a professional sense, off of being a prosecutor and relating in a way to mediated by a racist criminal justice system to the lives of working class Black and brown people in a way that Harris is excluded from profiting off of. And that seems to me to be a kind of identity politics that I have no personal interest in, but a revealing kind of identity politics, from the perspective of how we relate to elites, generally.

I think what we should think about in terms of elite capture in terms of building kinds of politics that respond to the fact that elites have incredible amounts of control over our social institutions, over our attention now, through social media, over our access to basic kinds of security, we what we need to do, I think, is develop an orientation towards building power. So one of the things I've been talking about, and thinking about with other people is the idea of different forms of governance, that build power for communities. So there are a variety of people talking about ideas, like community control over police, for example, talking about community land trusts, talking about things that increase the power of ordinary people over the things that determine the outcome of their lives. And we should pair those with the kinds of things that perhaps we're more used to thinking; about antitrust struggles against big tech, struggles against fossil fuel companies for divestment, or for holding executives to criminal charges for their role in climate misinformation. But the idea is, the balance of power between us and them will determine what happens politically. So there's a role both for reducing the power of elites and increasing the power of non-elites. And both of those things have to get done, if we're going to have better political conditions. And so there's a long term conversation about whether or not there should be elites. But I think a conversation we can have right now is what we think of the power balance of power between elites and the rest of the world, and what we can do in concrete and measurable senses to change the balance of power.

Ayana Young  Well, right now especially, it feels as if we are witnessing the American psyche experience a great denial. I’ve read several of your articles reflecting on attitudes around COVID in the United States, how the state responds to disaster, and the trajectory of climate denial. What stage of denial do you think the United States is in and is there time to get out? 

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  Thank you. Interesting question. I think the US as a whole is somewhere between the bargaining and anger stages of grief, right? Where I think about the response to things like the 1619 project, for example. And you have, especially on social media, a whole torrent of culture war like responses from people. And eventually, even the White House gets involved and there's federal bans on what kinds of training federal employees can receive and whether or not they mentioned systemic racism. And it's in situations like these where I find it hardest to jump out of the mindset of someone who studies race for a living. Because from the mindset of someone who studies race for a living, it's very difficult to track what's going on. Right? The U.S.’s investment in very explicit white supremacy. Very naked white supremacy is the vast majority of its history. Whether from the colonial days of wars between settlers and Indigenous People's and the original cotton plantations, or the pre Civil War era, or the post Civil War era of lynching, and redemption, and what Nell Painter calls bulldozing, the embrace the explicit embrace of eugenics by many members of the U.S. ruling class, the United States didn't even pretend to be invested in a serious way in racial equality until actually quite recently within the lifetime of people who are alive now. 

So when people object vehemently, when people object, in strong terms to the light suggestion, that race has something to do, in an important way with US history, when people are offended by this, when people are enraged by this, I just fundamentally don't understand. You know, in a way I understand, right? I grew up in the Midwest, right, I received the kind of education that most people in this country receive in public school, in elementary school, and middle school, in high school, I get it, I get how you could have grown up and not been exposed to the sorts of things I ended up reading about later. Because I too, grew up and wasn't exposed to those things. So it's not the not knowing that I don't understand. But it's the rage that defends that not knowing. Right, it's the principal defense of ignorance that I find hard to understand, and hard to respond to, for the simple reason that I find it hard to understand. 

So it's certainly a kind of denial. I'm not sure of what else there is to say about it other than that, it's a kind of denial. But I think that, as always, our political outcomes are going to be determined by who wins contests of various kinds, contests of wills, contests, over legislation, contests over contracts, contests over regulations, the sorts of pushes and pulls that build our social structure. And I think some amount of preaching to the choir is going to be involved. Another thing that I think because of where I grew up, and how I grew up, is that there's just some people who will never accept that there are things wrong with the U.S., that it was complicit with certain kinds of injustice, that they owe their position in life and their advantages to those injustices. There are people who won't come to that conclusion, irrespective of what we do and how we relate to them. And I think it's important that we make our peace with this. And there are some things that we should just address to those people who will. And perhaps, some of these truths, some of these political perspectives are better reserved for the people who are willing to take a second look at some of these issues.

Ayana Young  Olúfẹ́mi, I’d like to thank you for taking the time to discuss some of these very conceptual and gravely important issues with me and as we come to a close, I’d like to ask you a personal question, which is - what do you do with all of this knowledge? How do you feel empowered to withstand the waves of paralysis that are becoming more prevalent?

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò  That's a great question. What do I do? I think the broad perspective that I have is a very practically focused perspective, right? There's a lot of theoretical things that I think there's a lot of opinions I have about, you know, history and theory and counterfactuals and all that stuff, but ultimately, the point of doing that is to decide what to do to decide how to act in the world. And 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? Like, if you asked me how likely I think it is that we're going to face genocide by the end of the century, I'll give you a very pessimistic sounding answer. If you ask me to rate the chances that we achieve justice in my generation, and the following generation, I’ll give you a similarly pessimistic sort of answer. 

So it's not that having a practical perspective makes it impossible for me to think that things are going very badly. But there's a way that it just changes the subject. Because I've decided that I want to do what I can, with what's available to me, in the situation that I'm in. I just don't ask the question very often. How likely is it that will succeed? I just skip to the question of what I should do, given what the situation is like? What's our best shot? What 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? 

I think getting involved and taking action builds something that functions a lot like hope in us. And if I had to describe what that thing was, the closest word I can come to is acceptance. I just accept, I just understand that the odds are dire. But by confronting those odds, I've already decided that the odds are good enough that I'm going to keep going. And I can't say that that perspective stops me from being kept up at night. I can't say that perspective gives me a rosy picture of the world, I can't say that I don't struggle with depression, because of, or partially because of the things that I study and think about. But I can say that there's a kind of despair that gets taken off the table by that way of relating to the world. Whatever the world is, like, I'm gonna suit up and I'm going to join the people who are on my team, and together we're going to do whatever it is that's left for us to do. Even if that is just to fail with dignity, that's still something that I can reach for, that I can try to achieve and that we can try to achieve. And I think that perspective unlocks a lot of possibility, not just for dealing with the crisis in a way that psychologically is better for us. But actually also in making better things possible, right, and undoing the kinds of political conditions that invite despair in the first place. And so I think the more that we can do that, the more that we can join the kinds of political groups and the kinds of political struggles that put us in the game, rather than watching from the bench and hoping that the score changes.

Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to another episode of For The Wild Podcast. The music you heard today was by 40 Million Feet. Ulali, and Rajna Swaminathan. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell, and Melanie Younger.