Factually! with Adam Conover - Reconsidering Reparations with Olufemi Taiwo

Episode Date: March 2, 2022

The American conversation about reparations is sadly narrow. But what if reparations could address not just the sins of the past, but the injustices of the present? Olufemi Taiwo, author of the new book Reconsidering Reparations, joins Adam to explain. Check out his book at http://factuallypod.com/books Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

You know, I got to confess, I have always been a sucker for Japanese treats. I love going down a little Tokyo, heading to a convenience store, and grabbing all those brightly colored, fun-packaged boxes off of the shelf. But you know what? I don't get the chance to go down there as often as I would like to. And that is why I am so thrilled that Bokksu, a Japanese snack subscription box, chose to sponsor this episode. What's gotten me so excited about Bokksu is that these aren't just your run-of-the-mill grocery store finds. Each box comes packed with 20 unique snacks that you can only find in Japan itself.

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So if all of that sounds good, if you want a big box of delicious snacks like this for yourself, use the code factually for $15 off your first order at Bokksu.com. That's code factually for $15 off your first order on Bokksu.com. I don't know the way. I don't know what to think. I don't know what to say. Yeah, but that's alright. Yeah, that's okay. I don't know anything. Hello and welcome to Factually. I'm Adam Conover. Thank you so much for joining me once again as I talk to one of the most fascinating thinkers from around the world of human knowledge about all the amazing shit they know, all the amazing perspectives they have that I don't have, that you may not have. Both of our minds are going to be blown together. We're going to have a really awesome time. Now, before we get started, I would be remiss if I didn't acknowledge what's happening in Ukraine right now. I am as shocked and as dismayed as so many of you are. And, you know, that's that's all I have to say about it at the moment.

Here's the thing. I don't know a lot about foreign policy, about geopolitics is something that I'm curious about, but I do not claim to be an expert. I don't claim to be an expert about anything, but least of all, global affairs like this. I'm not one of those people who's going to start spouting off on Twitter that, you know, we need to set up a no-fly zone or this is all NATO's fault or, you know, whatever the various positions are. I don't think that's my job right now to spout off about what's happening. I think my job, as it is for so many of us, is to watch and listen and learn and understand and

see what's happening, see it with clear eyes and try to understand it so that we can start to build a world where things like this happen less often. And part of my learning process about this is going to be trying to find folks who can come on the show to talk to us about it, not just about what's happening there, but what led us there, et cetera. So that's a project that we're going to be jumping into, trying to find folks to bring on the show who can talk to us about that. And in the meantime, I'm going to be doing what all of you are doing and just trying to listen and learn as best I can. So with that being said, I hope you're all able to stay safe. If we have listeners in Ukraine and we might, I hope you are able to stay safe.

And I hope we can start building a better world together. And so on that note, let's talk about today's episode. Today, we're going to be talking about reparations. Now, in America, in recent years, we've had a renewed conversation about reparations, reparations for slavery specifically. The writer Ta-Nehisi Coates wrote an article for The Atlantic, an excellent one called The Case for Reparations a couple of years ago, which really jump-started that conversation. And it's only grown since in the wake of the killing of George Floyd and the renewed civil rights movement that we've seen in America. But our conversation about reparations has been strangely narrow. So often, we limit ourselves to asking, hey, should the descendants of enslaved Americans

be cut a check? And if so, for how much? Like, okay, slavery was bad, but come on, dude, how much do I owe you? And let me say, that's a really limited way to look at it and really impoverishes the conversation that we could or should be having. Because what happens when you pull the string on the historical atrocity of slavery and ask what it really means? Like, first of all, consider the fact that the transatlantic slave trade did not only bring slaves to America.

Slavery of that sort was practiced all over the world globally. And the modern world was in fact built on slavery. America's entire economy for hundreds of years and the economy of other nations were built on the practice of chattel slavery, and our countries would be unrecognizable and certainly far, far less wealthy if it had not been practiced. The countries that practice slavery benefit from it to this day, and the countries that were exploited by slavery still suffer.

In fact, recent scholarship shows that the countries that had the most slaves taken from them are still the poorest in Africa today, still. Then, consider the fact that the economy that was built on the back of slavery, the industrialized capitalist economy that was built on the back of slavery, the industrialized capitalist economy that we have today, is causing harm on a massive scale through resource extraction, very low wage, or even forced labor. Yes, slavery does still exist today. And of course, climate change on a massive scale. And of course, climate change, when it gets really bad, is going to affect people in those already suffering countries the most and the worst.

So when we talk about reparations, when we talk about making amends for the historical crime that was slavery, should we really be talking about something that just happened in the past that we need to do a big My Bad Dude for? Or are we talking about an ongoing system that is still affecting us today? What if we stop talking about making amends for the sins of the past and instead start talking about fixing the system that we have today and how? Well, look, that's a huge question. You'd probably need to write an entire book to even begin to explain it. And luckily for us, that is what our guest today did.

His name is Olufemi Taiwo, and he's a philosophy professor at Georgetown and the author of Reconsidering Reparations. His work is a fascinating mix of social science and contemporary philosophy steeped in the black radical tradition and activism. And it is growing in influence throughout the world. He also publishes in academic journals and in popular outlets like The New Yorker and The Guardian. We are so lucky to have him. Please welcome on the show today, Olufemi Taiwo. Femi, thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. So you have a book out about reparations and climate justice. Let's just start with the basics. When you say reparations, what do you mean? And, you know, why is that an important topic to talk about? So when I say reparations, I mean, the thing that people imagine, which is just cash money, right? People getting checks, right? But I also mean restructuring the world around those checks. I mean, redistributing not just dollars, but also power. And why is that like, what's the importance of doing that?

Let's just go a little bit of the bigger context to your thought. like uh what's the importance of doing that let's just go a little bit of the bigger context to your thought so there's a lot of things that people talk about under the heading of reparations i'm in particular talking about reparations for transatlantic slavery and colonialism and part of what's different about transatlantic slavery and colonialism than other things is that while they involved atrocities, like unfortunately happened a lot in the world, these particular atrocities actually built the world. We have a planet-sized economic and social structure because of those particular injustices. So I think reparations for the constructive process of our world should also be constructive. You know, I call my way of thinking about reparations the constructive

view of reparations. And I think a lot of reparations activists over decades and centuries have had that kind of transformational vision for what reparations could do. transformational vision for what reparations could do. I mean, that, that is a lot broader and of a vision than, you know, like, like the, the sort of view of reparations I grew up with was like, okay, well, you know, black Americans suffered under slavery and under, you know, centuries and centuries and centuries of various forms of oppression that therefore we should give folks a leg up and cut them a check. Right.

But that's sort of a very, so sort of embedded in the word reparations. Hey, we're going to make a reparation for a wrong previously done. But yeah, this is a much broader view. Tell me more about what you mean about the transatlantic slave trade creating the world, because I think I know what you mean, but I want to hear you say it. creating the world because i think i know what you mean but i want to i want to hear you say it so for much of human history there have been big social systems networks of trade networks of language and culture sharing sometimes they've been really big like the you know the silk road connected lots of what's now europe and asia. But having a system of trade and politics the size of the planet, that's actually new.

That actually didn't happen until the 1500s. And the reason why it happened is because the empires that were building trade networks, imperial conquest and slavery to build those up, built a system that was so large it encompassed the whole globe. So that's the system that we live in now. It was built in a particular time, starting in the 1400s and really taking shape in the late 1500s. And it's because we have a system that big that we have capitalism now. Capitalism grew out of these trade networks. It's because we have a system that big that we have change. It's the energy transformation that happens as a result of exploiting those trade networks that produced the huge emissions

and the possibility for huge emissions that produced the climate change. Okay, I think I get it. So here's, let me repeat my dumb, dumb version of it. It's like, you know, in, the, in the birth of colonialism, you know, over the last number of centuries, huge amounts of, you know, the, the, the powers of Europe bring huge amounts of people from Africa to North America to like do basically cash crops or, you know, huge amounts of like farming production, pushing indigenous folks out of their land

and like starting to sell those things back in Europe, around the world. That's a new development economically. And it also leads to like the industrial revolution, right? Like this is that we wouldn't have an industrial revolution if we didn't have all these ships going back and forth, carrying goods back and forth and creating this like global system of capitalism exactly it got built up you know much earlier than we think right um but also it's recent at the scale

of human history i mean 500 years 600 years that's, that's an eye blink in terms of the planet. How long the planet's been here in the human species. Yeah, it's wild. What you're saying is making a lot of sense to me because I heard a comparison years ago, and I wish I could remember where it was, but it was a it was a comparison between living under slavery and living under or living at the time of slavery in North America and living now under the regime of climate change. Because, like, even if you're a abolitionist living in New York City who, you know, is like, you know, doing what you can to end slavery, you still are living under a world and an economic system that was built by slavery. Everything that you have in your tenement apartment

in New York came out of that economic system that the entire country built. And that's one of the reasons it was so hard to uproot. It took hundreds and hundreds of years, longer than we've lived without slavery, to uproot it because it was so deeply embedded in the economic system. And the comparison that I read was that's the same thing that's true of of climate change, of fossil fuel production, that like as much as I can try to personally fight against that, it's like, well, hey, literally everything I own, every part of my life is like embodied fossil fuel emissions. It was produced by those things. And everything I'm going to do to try to fight that is also created out of fossil fuel emissions.

And so the point of whatever article I read, probably in The New Yorker or something like that, was, you know, it's going to be as big a task. It's going to take as long. It's going to be as difficult as it was to end slavery. But what you're talking about unites the two ideas like even more closely together, that they're like really the same thing. Yeah. And I think they are the same thing. But I also think, you know, there's just a kind of practical connection between them, too. just a kind of practical connection between them too. Right. Which is, if you think about racial justice, you think about, you know, right. You think about ending racist police violence.

You think about ending job discrimination and mass incarceration. And what is it going to take to do that? And how is the world going to improve with respect to those things in a world that's much hotter, in a world where, you know, people are, where there's a lot more conflict between great powers? Are those the kinds of political conditions that are better for eradicating injustice or worse. And I think, you know, even if you, even if the history stuff doesn't move you quite as much, I think you can just think of it from a practical perspective, you know, are we going to get big movements for justice in a world where the biggest militaries in the world are fighting and there's

large widespread climate displacement. And none of those things are being responded to from a climate justice mindset. I think probably not. I think that's the worst world, you know, for any kind of justice. You're saying climate justice has to come first or at least come at the beginning. It has to be something that we work on immediately. Yeah. I wouldn't say come first, but I would say the projects have to be integrated.

Yeah. So the way that you pursue climate justice has to be racial justice sensitive and vice versa. Yeah. Well, so let's talk more about the climate justice piece of it. I mean, what is the, let's start from the basics. What are the climate injustices that we should be concerned about currently? Oh boy.

Yeah, I'm sure it'll be a short list. So one of the examples I like to start with is the example of Hurricane Katrina, because I think it just, it gives you a sense of the breadth of things we should be thinking about and looking at when we're trying to figure out what climate crisis is going to have to do with injustice. You know, you look at, first of all, which people were in an economic and social position to evacuate, and race is a factor, as is age and disability, right? Then if you look at how the powers that be

responded to people who weren't able to evacuate in the case of Hurricane Katrina, people who weren't able to evacuate in the case of Hurricane Katrina, which people were labeled as looters and shot at by both vigilantes and law enforcement officials, in which people were taken to be victims looking for food and medicine. Race had a lot to do with that as well. And then if you look at the recovery, which people got the lion's share of disaster insurance payouts, which are in some cases tied to the value of homes, which are in turn racially. Yeah. If you own a more valuable home, you receive a larger disaster payout. Why is one home more valuable than another?

There's a history of redlining and all of this and the wealth gap and et cetera. So I get that. Yeah, it fits in very well with a lot of stuff we've talked about on this show. Yeah. Exactly. And you put all these things together and Hurricane Katrina is not going to be the last time.

It wasn't the last time. Yeah. And it's not just disaster, right? It's also, you know, what the plans are to prevent disasters. So if you look at the gap in funding for what gets called climate adaptation, what are the things that we're doing to try to prevent flooding in the cases of worse weather? What are the things we're trying to do to have managed retreat away from sea level in the cases where that's supposed to do? Where that funding is going and I think where it isn't going, which is more the story at this point. at this point. Yeah. All those things, all those forms of vulnerability have to do with political power and political power is what race is about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, like also regarding disasters,

it's like the difference between a couple of years ago, the hurricane in Texas and the one that hit Puerto Rico and like the like in the same year, I think the vast difference in response from straight up FEMA to that and then the amount of time it took those areas to rebuild and etc. And yeah, when it comes to adaptation, I see it, too. I mean, I grew up on Long Island and I remember this was 20 years ago. But like, you know, there's all these beaches and there's these houses built on the bluffs. You know, people will build their houses right on the bluffs. And I remember there being such a call at the time for like, Hey, we got to be careful about erosion on these beaches because there's houses at the top. There's big ass, big mansions at the top that people have built at the

top, you know? And it took me a couple of decades before I was like, why is everyone so concerned about those rich people's houses up top? You know, like that's like, and, and thinking about what you're saying, when we talk about adaptation, you know, the million multimillion dollar homes in Florida are going to get, those people are going to get bailed out and they're, cause they're going to be able to fight for that for themselves. And a lot of other people are not. So how do we, I mean, that's what will happen at least if we allow our normal systems of, you know, distribution of funds and power to continue. How do we change those systems in order to try to ensure more climate justice? So, I mean, one set of things, like I mentioned already, is just to give people money.

It's an extremely direct way to change who can do what in society. You know, I mean, money doesn't rule exactly everything, but pretty close, right? And so the, you know, if you want to be fancy about it, the unconditional cash transfer is a really good policy tool. You know, whether it's African-American descendants of the enslaved in the U.S., whether it's the people who live in the Caribbean getting reparations from the United Kingdom, I think that's definitely a place to start. But we should also give money unconditionally to the governments and organizations that exist, at least nominally, to protect people.

So at the international level, there was a fund set up called the Green Climate Fund, which is just an easy example of this kind of thing. The rich countries of the world promised to give 100 billion dollars to facilitate green, renewable development in the global south. They didn't do it. They gave barely money at all. And when they did give money, it was in the form of loans, which generate debt instead of just cash to build the things. And that's not really the way to go. So, I mean, more money would be a great place to start. But it's not like it's an accident that they haven't given the money. It's because the people who are in charge don't want to, and they get to make the decision.

So I think shifting decision-making power is also important. And yeah, that's, that was going to be my next question because like, it's all well and good to say, Hey, this is what we should do. And of course we need to, we need to like have a clear idea of what we should do. But the reasons we have to do those things, the reason we need to cut some checks is because the money hasn't been distributed equitably, equitably so far. Reason it hasn't been distributed equitably is because power is not distributed equitably. And, you know, some people have more powers than other people who people with McMansions on the bluffs on Long Island, you know, are going to get more attention for their issues because they have more power to begin with. So yeah, that, that seems to be the deeper issue. How do we begin to address that?

I mean, I guess normally I save the, what do we do for the end of the episode, but I'm very curious. We're moving there so quickly. Yeah. I mean, right now I think we are, we're in a kind of kitchen sink scenario. We got to try everything. Yeah. But there are a few approaches that make most sense to me. So I'll say a little bit about what the better decision-making structures would be.

There have been a lot of activists and organizations fighting for what they call energy democracy. activists and organizations fighting for what they call energy democracy. So having not only public ownership in the sense of the state owns or countries own, you know, the plants and transmission lines that produce and distribute energy, but that there's genuine community level control over what they do and how they distribute energy and what choices they make about whether or not to pursue this or that renewable option or any renewable option. If we can make those choices democratic, then we'll probably get decisions made that are more in line with what's good for people rather than what's good for a handful of investors. I hope so. I hope that's the case. I'm not sure that, you know, look, I'll be completely honest. I'm not 100 percent sure. I live in Los Angeles. I'm not entirely sure if you put it up to a straight vote of, you know, people who live in Los Angeles County, if you'd get climate policies that we need, you know, if you'd get people saying like,

hey, let's electrify buildings, let's get rid of our gas stoves and electrify buildings, right? Like that's a fight that's happening across California right now. And that's a simple climate policy. That's not like particular, there's justice elements to that because of who suffers from emissions and that kind of thing. But, you know, I, I do have that concern about, you know, not that I'm against democracy, of course I'm for democracy, but, you know, I don't know. What do you, what do you think about that? I think that's a real concern. We, and we need to be concerned about it.

And we need to look that in the face. And, you know, I don't think we should be idealistic or pie in the sky about, you know, what energy democracy is going to do. As soon as we put it to a vote, everyone's going to turn out to be a totally altruistic person and, you know, totally have mastered the climate science or whatever. I don't think that's a way of thinking about that makes sense. What I also don't think is a way of looking at that makes sense is thinking that a scenario where corporate investors that explicitly exist to maximize profit and value for shareholders, I don't think that it makes sense to think that that's going to produce the green energy revolution either. So the point is just comparative. It's not that democracy is this ideal thing that could never work wrong.

It's just that corporate decisions a little better decisions. Yeah, exactly. Corporate decisions really aren't going to work. So that's what we have left to try, I think. Yeah. Got it. But then it starts to look like the the the project of trying to achieve this kind of justice is like the the project of of, I don't know, reforming our entire society to be more democratic, to like uplift the voices of folks who are more marginalized, more affected by the worst things in society. I guess that's the project, right?

That's the project. That's exactly what it is. Got it, okay. Sounds easy, let's do it tomorrow. Yeah, I mean, man, I I'm, I'm often, uh, I'm often struck by the gap again between like what we, you know, what we say we should do things X, Y, Z, and the gap between getting there. And, but that's, you know, I guess you can,

you can't take that as being a detriment that has has to be, hey, that's the project. That's what we're here to do, right? Right. And I always like to think about it this way. If you were standing in the French colony of Stantemang in 1770 or in South Carolina in 1845. I don't think you would have had much reason to think that you were standing in a place where slavery was going to be abolished in a handful of years. Yeah, absolutely. But that's what happened.

Yeah. absolutely. But that's what happened. Yeah. Right. Before the Second World War, a quarter of the landmass of the world and the population of the world was under the control of the British Empire alone. Wow. By 1970, a couple of decades after the Second World War, the number of member states to the United Nations had more than tripled. That's how many national independence movements fought and won independence from their former colonial masters. Yeah. So the scale of, you know, the scale of change to planetary politics that is required for climate crisis is massive and it's daunting, and we should think of it as massive and daunting, but it actually isn't unprecedented. It's something that's happened before, and it hasn't just happened for ill.

It's not just been changes in the direction of more accumulation and more evil. There have also been changes of that scale in the direction of justice. And there's no reason to give up on that. Yeah, that's a wonderful view. It reminds me of, there's a quote from, I think it's Ursula K. Le Guin that, and I'm going to butcher it, but it's, you know, capitalism seems like it could never end, but that's what people used to think about the divine right of kings, that it was permanent. I've completely butchered the quote, but the words divine right of kings are in there, I'm pretty sure. And, yeah, that's a wonderful view, although it does it does make the question like, are you going to be one of the generations lucky enough to see that regime end? You know, because like that was true, the divine right of kings. Also, ninety nine point nine percent of people who live in the divine right of kings died before it ended.

And the same could be true for you and I regarding climate and capitalism but that doesn't uh doesn't preclude us from making the effort yeah that's that's absolutely true and you know this actually this problem right here is what the last chapter of the book is about you know starting to think of yourself as an ancestor and trying to you know do what you can do in your lifetime, understanding that you, you may or may not see the total fruits of it in your lifetime, but that doesn't mean that there's nothing to do, that there's nothing to contribute to. Yeah. Tell me more about that. Seeing yourself as an ancestor, like what what is that how do you take on that point of view and what does it mean for you when you do so so in the book i tell this i tell

a little silly story about a guy making soy sauce in the traditional manner i love soy sauce i just had soy sauce well it's so good an hour ago it's great but i don't know anything about the traditional manner of making it mine was kikoman but you know i mean i didn't either until i i've read this story about this guy it turns out you know a lot of soy sauce today is made in steel vats but the traditional way is to make it with wood vats part of why people you know don't make it the traditional way as much is because there's a lot that goes into being able to make it in this way the cedar trees that grow the wood grow over decades um it's a really finely honed skill that it takes to make the right kind

of barrels out of this wood and there's only a handful of people living now who have the knowledge to make it. But the reason why this guy can, you know, in the 21st century, make soy sauce the way he's making it is because one day in the 1920s, his grandfather and his grandfather's neighbor decided to plant some cedar trees. You know, notedar trees you know not knowing you know any particulars about what their grandson was going to be doing in the next millennium but just understanding that what it takes to keep this good thing going is for them to do something today that makes something possible tomorrow wow And generations of abolitionists just did that, right?

Abolitionism didn't start, you know, right before the U.S. Civil War or, you know, right before any of the other political struggles in the Western Hemisphere. Generations of people fought for that. Slavery, the transatlantic slavery, the transatlantic slave trade is super long. Like the person, a person who was born when the Portuguese empire started, the transatlantic slave trade could have been a grandparent by the time Christopher Columbus sailed to what's now Haiti. Really? Wow. Centuries, centuries, hundreds of years,

generations upon generations upon generations of people. And it wasn't until, you know, the 1780s in Haiti or the 1860s in the U.S. It wasn't until then that people got to see the end of, you know, the logical conclusion of abolitionist struggles, but people did see the end of it. And it's because people kept the flame going. People kept the resistance going. And that can be us.

Yeah. Oh, that's wonderful. I mean, look, again, I love ending episodes on a note like that, but also I'm so happy that people are going to hear it earlier in the episode and get a little bit of hope to bring us through the second half. I love that. I love that vision because, like, you know, I have friends who talk about, you know, abolition, whether, you know, a lot of times in criminal justice reform, people talk about, you know, abolition, they'll say, stick out an abolitionist position, which is like one that I agree with, but one that I'm like, my God, like what a, what a, what a far off goal, you know? And what that, what you just said put me in mind of is that for goals like that, well, that's what it must have felt like to be an abolitionist in fucking 1620

or whatever right which is like in 1620 i don't know slavery's already been going on for like a century right the transatlantic slave trade and it's got centuries more to go um and you must sound like the craziest person on earth um to to people uh but that work is like, is still accretive, you know, is still doing something, is still worth pursuing because eventually, eventually, eventually it bears fruit. Exactly. Incredible. Well, let's go to break on that note. We'll be right back with more Olufemi Taiwo. Okay, we're back with Olufemi Taiwo. This has been such an awesome conversation so far.

I want to bring it back to, we've talked about the past, we've talked about the future. I want to bring it back to the present for a little bit. I know that you talk about how we have a racialized system of like production and distribution in the world. Because a lot of times when we talk about reparations and especially the very narrow, you know, American debate about reparations, if you ask the average American politician, you know, they always make it about, well, things happened in the past. And so we need to like atone for them in the present.

And that's the argument that we're having. But my understanding is you're you're really talking about things that are happening now in terms of the way that we've established our capitalist system to have, you know, differential outcomes and impacts on people now. Can you talk about that? Yeah, there's a really, there's a really important scholar, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, whose work deals with geography and prison abolition. And she actually defines racism in more or less this way.

What racism is, is the differential distribution of what she calls vulnerability to premature death. But the stuff that will kill you, essentially, Black, Indigenous people get more of that.

And the stuff that will protect you, you know, white people get more of that. That's more or less, that's more or less the idea. And if you, and if you, social science pretty much

bears this out. The Black unemployment and white unemployment in the U.S., just to give a U.S. centered example, are structurally different.

They, to my knowledge, have not converged at any point in the last five decades, which is more or less when they started collecting this kind of national level data. In that the levels are different for Black and white Americans, like the unemployment rates are different. They never converge. Yeah, yeah so um black unemployment is just structurally one and a half to three times what white unemployment is and kind of you know varies within that range somewhere wow and why is is there a structural reason or a single reason for that i mean presumably not it's got to be yeah i i think it's a exactly you know it's it's not

like there's a single point of the system that explains it yeah um but there there are a lot of different things when it comes to generational wealth and generational education patterns job discrimination susceptibility to mass incarceration, which then lets you be legally discriminated against, you know, all of these kinds of factors kind of come together, but they add up to that. Yeah. And so, sorry, I cut, I cut you off. Like when you, when you talk about more exposure to the stuff that'll kill

you how does that factor in yeah so you know another another thing that you find um this is something that um robert bullard's work is really famous for in terms of environmental racism. But you also find, suspiciously, that the air where Black people live is more polluted than the air where white people live, on average. The United Church of Christ back in the 80s, I believe, found that three out of five Black and Brown, Black and Latino, I should say, folks lived near a toxic waste site. There are all these, and you add policing on top of that and incarceration on top of that. And there are all these things that will make your life worse that seem to be attracted to you like a magnet, depending on race. And obviously class is a huge part of this as well, but it's not reducible to class. Yeah. I mean, and all you have to do is look at the city you live in to see that that's the case. I mean, I I'm flying later today. I got to go to the airport and, you know, I'm going to LAX where, you know, huge amount of emissions, huge amount of noise.

It's not in a white neighborhood. You know what I mean? I'm going 45 minutes outside of, you know, South Beverly Hills, right. To get there. And there's certainly a lot of impacts. Like I've read plenty of articles about, you know, folks who live there, what they, you know, what they go through. Right. So, and I'm sure folks listening, look at your own place where you live. You could see things that are similar. Yeah, absolutely. So we're really talking about literally how the world is constructed. Yeah. Like where LAX is and where the neighborhoods are around it and who lives in them.

You know, we're not talking about who gets more respect or who is on more Netflix shows. It's not like those are unrelated, but, you know, we're talking about the nuts and bolts of how society operates at its most fundamental levels. Yeah. And I mean, this must there must be a connection here with, say, the global supply chain as well, right? Who is doing the most dangerous forms of labor? Like when we talk about, you know, the capitalist system that is, you know, causing climate change and is caused by, you know, the iPhone that I hold in my hand, the, the, the, um, the climate impacts of that, like the, you know, who is doing the mining of the minerals,

who is doing the, uh, construction of the actual, you know, equipment who's, who's like, you know, destroying their eyesight and their fine motor function, assembling the thing. Like these are, uh, similarly like very focused harms that are being levied on certain populations and not on others. Yeah, absolutely. And it's just as visceral and literal and concrete there. Right. The raw materials are mined or produced in some part of the world and then they get refined a little bit in some other part of the world and then maybe turned into a good that's ready for consumers some else somewhere else in the world and depending on where each of those stages are, the labor protections are going to look very different.

Yeah. Right. You know, I don't know what sick leave policies are in, you know, rebel controlled minds in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, but I'm guessing it doesn't look like france's yeah um it might look closer to the u.s's sick leave policy but that's slightly another story well you know except it's uh the uh the white collar employees at Apple, right, who are programming the software have a good sick leave policy. But, you know, we don't have a national one. But, you know, the people in

America who have the power have the protection, as you say, right, have health insurance and it's just we don't have a country that gives that to people equally um but you know i mean you could look at say france which is a country that i assume has a more uh nationalized policy but they're still outsourcing you know the a lot of their labor to other countries that don't have those policies so it's you know the the impacts are still borne unequally in both situations yeah and not only are they outsourcing um that but they're also in you know i think fairly nakedly imperial ways helping to organize the whole global economy to keep that going right so there are a number of um african nations that are still kind of tacitly organized by French economic interests. There's a currency called the CFA franc, although there's been changes recently, but that was, you know, more or less controlled by the French National Bank. And many, you know,

those are former explicit colonies of the French Empire whose economies were built around French interests. And there are tons of those kinds of relationships in the world as it stands, because those are the kinds

of relationships that built the world. It just is what we were talking about earlier it's these kind of colonial ventures they're the reason why we have a planet-sized economic system in the first place and they explain a fair bit about how that planet-sized economic system works and who gets protected from it and who gets rich off it and then when we talk about climate change itself, you know, we've already heard about disasters and that sort of thing. But like looking at it on an international level, all the countries that are signed to the Paris Agreement, for instance, there's a huge gap between, you know, one of the fundamental true political problems of that agreement and of like joint climate change action in general is

that like certain countries have already emitted so much and benefited from it, like the United States, like the United States and Europe to the largest extent. Also, you know, China has emitted plenty of emissions and many other countries as well. But it's disproportionately smaller countries that have emitted less, that have less resources that are going to be affected by climate change, especially when you look at like very small island nations that were former colonies that are like, hey, our we're just not going to exist as a country in a couple of years. Right. Unless unless we change things entirely. I think I'm thinking of the Marshall Islands,

I believe is one of those islands that has a problem, which I believe is the same. We almost did a segment on this for, for our television show, but we couldn't, we couldn't quite make it happen. But like the Marshall Islands is also a, a place that the United States stored an immense amount of its own nuclear waste on this island, on these islands. So, you know, these are places that disproportionately have so much less power, but are going to be affected to a much larger degree.

And that like bizarrely like weights the, you know, political calculation that needs to be made to actually do something about climate change. Yeah, it's totally backwards. The countries that not only have emitted the most, especially if we're talking cumulatively, and especially if we're talking in terms of in reference to how big their population is, China has emitted a lot, but they also have a ton of people. Same for India. Right. But it's those countries who have emitted the most that have the most control over global politics about what we're going to do about the climate crisis. And it's also those countries that largely explain not just their own emissions, but actually the economic possibilities for the rest of the world.

There was an attempt to have different models of development and different roles of the state in terms of how economies got built, especially in the years after those national independence movements we talked about after the second world war wait can you elaborate on that and how so yeah so so um much of asia and africa got formal independence from their former colonial overlords via combinations of you know wars diplomacy etc etc in you know in the years after the second world war combinations of wars, diplomacy, et cetera, et cetera, in the years after the Second World War.

And this is at the same time as, of course, the Cold War. So the US and their imperial buddies had a decision to make. material buddies had a decision to make. Were they going to let the so-called third world kind of chart its own path? Or were they going to nudge them along a little bit into forms of government and forms of economic decisions that worked out a little better for them. And they chose door number two in a big way. It would be, you know, we could spend an hour just going over all of the ways that the U.S. and aligned countries worked to control the global system. Yeah. Assassinations, coups, working through international bodies like the International Monetary Fund,

bodies like the International Monetary Fund, you know, explicitly just exporting economists who would tell you, invest in this, don't invest in that, stop state funding for, you know, what do you need hospitals for? You know, don't do that. You know, higher education. What business does that drum up? You know, stuff like that. And so, you know, we're looking at, we're looking at responsibility for way more than emissions.

That's such a narrow way of thinking about responsibility for this political situation. We're looking at the world that was created very intentionally by the powers that were decades ago. And it's that level of, you know, I think it's that level of comprehensiveness we need to think about when we're thinking about what justice would look like moving forward. Wow. Yeah, you're right. I mean, that is so much bigger than just, okay, one country emitted a lot

and another country emitted a little. It's like, well, also the reason one country emitted a lot and another country emitted a little. It's like, well, also the reason one country emitted a lot and the other emitted a little is the high emitting country rigged the entire economic system so that they could continue emitting and also continue to like reap all the benefits of that while the other country is like, you know, just a pawn in the system like mining precious

ores and and toxifying their own country and not having a functional democracy or economy or etc so it's like the the the the deeper system was entirely tilted purposefully yeah wow okay and for such a long time you know that's where the phrase banana republic comes from yeah yeah the u.s would just be like i don't really like that government you should really have another one and you know here are some guys with guns to back that up and they did that quite a few times yeah and a lot of times it times it's American companies doing this as well. Like, you know, tilting.

I mean, you know, Exxon, the oil company, is big enough that it literally has, you know, it has foreign policy and has, you know, influenced,

it's just one company among many that's influenced entire political regimes. Also, it strikes me, you said third world and we often forget how, you know, you said third world, and we often forget how, you know, people say third world, they have a vague notion, ah, we probably shouldn't say that

anymore. Seems a little old fashioned to say it. But like, we forget, oh, yeah, that literally comes from the Cold War, right? That, that, like, there were, there were two worlds, there was the American dominated world, the USSR dominated world, and then everybody else is the third world who like just that framing positions every other country as like a pawn for the other two to struggle over uh right yeah exactly and you know and and the fact that you're bringing in corporations i think is really important right a lot of the times the real interest in some of the banana republics was American-based

fruit companies that really wanted to lock down the banana game and did so. Actually, not too long ago, the country of Nigeria had to sue Dick Cheney because he had... They sued him personally? actually not too long ago, the country of Nigeria had to sue Dick Cheney.

They sued him personally? They sued Halliburton. Ah, okay. Because Halliburton bribed in hundreds of millions of dollars, Nigerian state officials to get, you know, to get its government to make favorable deals for Halliburton. And this kind of subversion of whole other governments by multinationals that might be based in London or New York, or might actually be based in London and New York, but be based on paper in the Caymans, so they don't have to get taxed on all of this.

You know, this is also a big part of the explanation of our social reality. It always has been. Jamestown, the first of the American colonies, that was a corporate mission. King James was a shareholder in the Virginia company. Yeah. That's been the story the whole time. The very first episode of this podcast was with Adam Winkler, who wrote a book called We the Corporations about how our constitution directly descends from corporate charters. That, you know, this is a country that was founded by corporations in a very,

very real sense. And that corporations have always had more rights than people and have fought successfully for those rights for our entire history. And yeah, it's crazy when you realize the degree to which American multinational corporations have been more powerful than countries around the world and have been able to push them around. You know, we're used to thinking, OK, well, as big as as big as a corporation is, the American government at the end of the day is still more powerful, you know, can still still pass a law and regulate a company.

But if you're a country in Africa and, you know, Exxon or Chiquita Banana or whatever the fuck comes in, you know, you're you actually don't have as much power as as that company in a real way often. So, again, though, I return to the question of like when we're going to try to do something about this. which is our, you know, our only and best framework currently for doing something collectively about the climate crisis, is a product of this entire tilted, corrupt system that itself still replicates, you know, the same power imbalances that are the problem in the first place. That's like the problem with power is that, OK, we have a power imbalance. We need to fix it. How do we fix have a power imbalance. We need to fix it.

How do we fix it? Well, we need power to fix it. Who has the most power? The people who are powerful, who don't want to fix it because they have the most power. So it's like very, it starts to feel very circular. And you start to be like, where the hell do we gather together the power that we need in order to actually, you know, right the imbalance? I'm sure you've given this a lot of thought. What's what's your answer to that? Not that you have to have a single answer.

I'm sorry. That's maybe too big to challenge you with, but what, how do you think about it? Yeah. I mean, I think about it in terms of the power we do have, which is I think more than we sometimes think, especially if we're willing to combine forces. And the classic way of combining forces is, of course, the union. Right. Not because unions are some magic way of relating or, you know, everything every union has ever done has been morally, you know, has been morally unquestionable. But because the unions organize a kind of power that's popular, a kind of power that people have, and a kind of power that speaks to capitalists in a language they understand.

Yeah. Right. Unions have the power of the strike. They can say, you know, you built this whole world so that money would flow from the pockets of various people into your pocket. that move those dollars and we can stop doing that we can stop production we can you know we can stop working and we can do that unless and until you meet our demands and we you know i think especially in the us we tend to think of unions as just fighting over wages and benefits for the people who work there, which is obviously extremely, you know, that's a central thing that unions should be about. It's what working conditions and compensation are like for the workers in them.

But unions have fought for all sorts of things. of things. Transnational groups of unions fought against apartheid and supported anti-apartheid activists and people who were fighting in that struggle. Unions helped break Jim Crow. Unions helped cause the Arab Spring, toppling entire regimes. It's not just production that unions have the power to shut down, but it's actually social life in general that unions have the power to shut down. Yeah.

And short of world war, if you want a way to challenge power that involves doing something other than hoping that, you know, a second Paris agreement goes better to me, that's that's the answer. Yeah, is figuring out how to actually build power. figuring out how to actually build power. And that is the thing. And it's oddly missed when we talk about unions. That is like the fundamental thing that unions do is pool worker power together so that it is actually actionable to say, OK, as a group, we're going to lay down our tools and stop working. That is like truly the only thing. You can have as many working groups and committees as you want. But at the end of the day, like it's a it's a means of collecting very diffuse worker power into a focused point in order to get something done. And so that's a great answer to that question.

How do we combat power is by gathering our own and like, yes, unions are the main mechanism we have to do that. But I have to point out that like in the history of the American labor movement, like one of the there's a true dark side of, you know, racist unions that did not, you know, include African-Americans or people of other races that that avowedly didn't. And, you know, there's plenty of unions in America today who are on the wrong side of some of these issues. Right. That like, again, here in L.A., we have a, you know, the sort of power company workers union is currently very against, workers union is currently very against, you know, any kind of climate mitigation, anything that they would, you know, they're anti-Green New Deal, right? These are the folks who work for the public electrical utility. Now, it's still a democratic union and all that.

And so it's still better than having no union. But, you know, these are, you know, I think, But, you know, these are, you know, I think, as you say, it's not a magic bullet, right? Yeah, exactly. And I think my answer to this is pretty similar. I actually think it might be the same question at the end of the day as the earlier one about, you know, is more democracy going to be a solution or will it just kind of move the problem and you where the kind of justice movement that we would need at a global level even has a chance. It's the only kind where it would have a serious voice on the terms that the ruling class would have to answer. And I think, you know, if it's, again, if it's between

corporations deciding and the public deciding, whether we're talking about community-controlled electricity and energy democracy, or whether we're talking about backdoor agreements between rich ruling class folks or the demands of politicized working class unions. Either way, I think, you know, we have to, we only have a shot with the unions. We only have a shot with the unions we only have a shot with worker power yeah but we but we have i think we have a reason to i think we have a reason to be a little optimistic about how that might go you know not just because unions have a history of stepping up against apartheid or stepping up against jim crow you know not not only because, you know,

Dr. King's last address was to sanitation workers, right? Not only because of all those sorts of historical examples we could think of, but because of what's happening right now. It's the mine workers in West Virginia who are challenging Joe Manchin, right? It's, you know, it's a lot of there's a lot of energy not down to every single union but you know it was an seiu local that did what was called the first climate strike in the u.s mm-hmm and it's teachers unions in chicago and ok and Oklahoma that are using their workers power, worker power to challenge what state and local governments are doing with respect to people that are in the union, their students, their neighbors. And that's energy we need. Yeah. And it's also everything you're saying is a very good argument for why, because there's a debate in sometimes in labor circles about like whether unions should be tackling, you know, issues of racial justice. Right. And, you know, what I'd say is if you're like the greatest failure of the labor movement in the 20th century was its failure to do that in the mid part of the century to not have, you know, to have exclusive rather than inclusive unions racially. And the, the companies, the capitalists will use it as a stick to beat you with. If you don't do it, you know, they'll say, uh, like it happens, happens currently that, you know, people will try to organize a union

and the company will say, Hey, look, that, that union organizing committee is sure a lot of white guys on that, huh? Like, don't you, we at the company are, we're really the ones who care about racial justice. So just like, you know, listen to us instead. And, you know, if you don't include, you know, these issues in your organizing, then they will be used against you because it's like sort of an essential part of the work at this point is like addressing the issues that you're talking about. Yeah, exactly. You know, there'll be, there'll be use against you at the level of your union organizing.

They'll be used against you at the level of law itself. against you at the level of law itself. Right to work has, right to work, which is, essentially a misnamed version of a challenge to unions that's codified in law, right? There's a direct line from Jim Crow and racist exclusion to that as the law of the land in many states. And I think you have to get out ahead of that just from a tactical point of view, but also, what is it that you're trying to accomplish? If you just want to make, you know,

if what unions are for are for the defense of the working class, and you really mean that, then that's bigger than any one workplace. And you can't win that fight unless you're willing to fight it where it is, which is in the broad structures of society.

And that fight, let's just return to the point that we ended the first half of the show on like that fight is really worth taking up now, even though the goal seems so far away. If you think of yourself as an ancestor, as someone who's able to plant a seed, move the ball forward a little bit, whatever you like as your metaphor, bend the arc, whatever it is. Right, right.

But it is worthwhile in your view. Yeah, it's worthwhile. And there are things that we can win now that are maybe short of the total project of remaking the whole world. But I think our recognizable advances towards that, every place where we win community control over energy, every place, every institution that we get to divest from fossil fuels and invest in things that are pro-community. Every institution we get to divest from the carceral industries and invest in things that are good for people. Every victory of those kinds is a measurable victory towards a just world and away from this unjust world. And we shouldn't let, you know, the scale of what it is that we want in the long term block us from appreciating the scale of what we can do right now. That is a that is a beautiful message and an inspiring one to end on.

Yeah, man, I can't thank you enough for being here to talk to us about this. This has been awesome. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me. It was a great conversation. Well, thank you once again to Olaf Emitaiwo for coming on the show. I hope you enjoyed that conversation as much as I did. You can find his book, Reconsidering Reparations, at our special bookshop, factuallypod.com slash books. That's factuallypod.com slash books. And of course, your purchase will support not just this show, but also your local bookstore

as well. And hey, if you really want to support the show, just a reminder that you can subscribe at patreon.com slash adamconover for as little as $5 to receive bonus podcast episodes to join our live book club, where we're reading Anna Lee Newitz's Four Lost Cities and then discussing the book with Anna Lee when we finish it. And I post exclusive stand up there that I do not post anywhere else. Once again, you can sign up for that at patreon.com slash Adam Conover. I want to thank our $15 a month Patreon supporters, Allison Lipparato, Alan Liska, Antonio LB, Charles Anderson, Chris Staley, Drill Bill, M, Goddess Morgana, Hillary Wolkin,

Kelly Casey, Calis Frini, Mark Long, Michael Warnicke, Michelle Glittermum, Paul Mauck, I want to thank our producers, Chelsea Jacobson and Sam Roundman, Andrew WK for our theme song, the fine folks at Falcon Northwest for building me the incredible custom gaming PC that I'm recording this very episode for you on. You can find me online at Adam Conover or adamconover.net wherever you get your social media. Until next time, thank you so much for listening. We'll see you next time on Factually. That was a HeadGum Podcast.