Political pragmatism is a pre-requisite to securing a framework that achieves reparations

Responding to environmental calamity requires working political in- frastructure, the accumulated result of years of development of norms, legal structures, and institutional knowledge. For example: strong legislatures can effectively constrain or altogether prevent excess executive power—even that of dictators.56 Yet colonized countries, particularly on the African continent, often inherited relatively weak legislatures, deeply autocratic political structures, and the dictatorial institutional memory of colonial management.57 These initial conditions affected the trajectory of legislative power development even after formal independence was won, since legislative power develops over time and the effects of institutional development survive the rise and fall of particular regimes.58 This form of accumulation would then directly affect a number of the measures that researchers have found to be key determinants of climate vulnerability, including “government effectiveness,” “political rights,” “voice and ac- countability,” and “civil liberties.”59

Responding to environmental calamity and its impacts on public health requires a working epistemic infrastructure: robust networks of knowledge and trust. Substantial empirical and formal evidence suggests that these are the accumulated result of generations-worth of decisions. Some of these distant decisions shape how cultures of trust or distrust are passed down within and across social groups, which affects how knowledge is produced and distributed in a country, com- munity, or region.60 These factors combine powerfully in institutions, which tend to be built more vulnerably when social trust is low.61

This kicks off a cycle that is both stable and vicious. Low initial trust within and between groups translates into poor social institutions, whose corruption and ineffectiveness earns the next generation’s dis- trust, thus fueling an atmosphere of distrust that feeds into people’s relationships with each other as well. Other generations-spanning decisions are about building knowledge and the capacity to make use of it: these manifest in levels of investment in public education and research capacity, among other things. Neither the colonizers’ institutions nor the poor institutions built in the resultant atmosphere of distrust were up to the job: as of 2017, not a single one of the world’s top 100 research universities was located in Africa, Central America, or South America.62

Because of the confluence of ecological, political, and other post- colonial disadvantages, climate change is likely to further exacerbate and be exacerbated by every kind of international inequality. Another boxplot makes the case dramatically:

this second graph, Figure 5.2, shows the dramatic, structural differ- ence in historically accumulated climate vulnerability between coun- tries with different colonial histories. The colonizing parts of the world are now much less vulnerable to climate change than the regions they colonized, as measured by the aforementioned indicators (percentage of the population with access to sanitation, three measures of literacy rate, maternal mortality rate, caloric intake, voice and accountability, civil liberties, political rights, government effectiveness, and life ex- pectancy at birth).63 These measures are, again, general indicators of the extent to which people enjoy access to the social advantages and disadvantages that determine their capabilities and empower them to respond to stressors—climate or otherwise.64 What we’ve learned here is simply another lesson about how yesterday’s distribution affects tomorrow’s reality: heightened vulnerability to the incoming aspects 62 Florida, “The World’s Knowledge Capitals?” 63 Brooks, Adger, and Kelly, “The Determinants of Vulnerability and Adaptive Capacity at the National Level and the Implications for Adaptation,” 157. 64 Brida, Owiyo, and Sokona frame climate vulnerability in relation to community ability to respond to climate stressors, which they tie to the global economic context. Brida, Owiyo, and Sokona, “Loss and Damage from the Double Blow of Flood and Drought in Mozambique,” 528. What’s Next 171 5 4 3 2 Colonized Neither Country type Colonizer Figure 5.2 How climate vulnerability is distributed. of climate change just simply is greater deprivation in the status quo. The rich get richer and the poor get poorer. It is not that every aspect of today’s global racial empire is rooted in the impacts of climate change. But every aspect of tomorrow’s global racial empire will be. Climate change is set not just to redistribute so- cial advantages, but to do so in a way that compounds and locks in the distributional injustices we’ve inherited from history. If we don’t intervene powerfully, it will reverse the gains toward justice that our ancestors fought so bitterly for, ushering in an era of what the United Nations Special Rappoteur on extreme poverty and human rights calls “climate apartheid.”65 This represents a double challenge: we need to figure out how to ad- dress the ecological and the political disasters. The economic and po- litical systems developed by global racial empire are responsible for the 65 UN News, “World Faces ‘Climate Apartheid’ Risk, 120 More Million in Poverty.” Climate Change Vulnerability Index (5 = Most Vulnerable) 172 Reconsidering Reparations accumulations that explain the crisis: both the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the highly uneven buildup of advantages and disadvantages that determine how climate vulnerability is distrib- uted within and between countries. What Should We Do? Targets and Tactics

It’s easy to think, with all this talk of “worldmaking,” that we have to make a comprehensive plan in advance. But that’s just one way to think about progress toward justice. Another approach to building justice is processual—not centered anywhere in particular, but in a deeply plu- ralistic recognition of everyone’s rights to pursue the political programs that fit their situation, culture, and values. That way of thinking about justice is a good fit for the ideal of self-determination. That recognition has long been part and parcel of the anti-colonial strands of thought and practice that birthed the constructive view. Amílcar Cabral, who played an important role in the revolutionary struggles of Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau, argued that colonized peoples should return to the “upward paths” of their own cultures. Similar perspectives have been offered by some anti-colonial thinkers in the United States, like Wallace Coffee and Rebecca Tsosie.66 On this approach, we needn’t (and perhaps shouldn’t!) be committed a comprehensive program in advance, since different people will come up with different actions and approaches fitting different cultural contexts and strategic situations.

Philosopher Serene Khader explains where this approach goes wrong in her book Decolonizing Universalism. Some think that fighting for justice requires having a particular, “one-size-fits-all” view of polit- ical principles or a just social structure. This view, which Khader calls “justice monism,” has been at the heart of a lot of well-intentioned but ultimately misguided attempts to impose one society’s cultural values on another without regard for their context, culture, or political situ- ation. Fortunately, her engagement with the long history of transna- tional feminism leads her to another approach that she calls “justice enhancement”: where the goal is to improve justice rather than reach any particular end-point. Aspects of that struggle could involve a kind of universalism, one that objects to subordinating and oppressive power dynamics everywhere, but would identify these negative power dynamics by analyzing the society in question rather than by uncrit- ically imposing moral reflexes from somewhere else.67 Similarly, we don’t have to agree on every aspect of the new world we’re building to agree on ways to improve the justice of our current arrangements.

Political systems are most amenable to progressive change when the interests of the elites align with those negatively affected by the system. Legal scholar Derrick Bell went as far as to name this the “prin-ciple of interest convergence,” arguing that racial progress for African Americans has only been possible when it coincided with whites’ interests. Bell pointed out that, before Brown v. Board provided a Supreme Court ruling and thus a legal basis for ending racial segre- gation of education, African Americans had spent generations artic- ulating what ended up being the basis for the Court’s ruling. What explains the Court finally seeing the light were political facts about the balance of power in a contest of “interest-group politics with a racial configuration.”68 The federal government needed to shore up its stra- tegic position in global politics given the unprecedented anti-colonial movement, much of which was spearheaded by Communists hostile to the racist politics built into global racial empire and its connection to African Americans’ political situation. Moreover, white Southerners realized that state-sponsored segregation blocked urban development in the South and thus stood in the path of profit. The interests of white southerners with regional investments, federal government anti- communists, and Black schoolchildren converged, and the powers that be moved accordingly, striking a massive blow against Jim Crow and its scheme of racial apartheid.

We can convert the convergence of interests between elite and op- pressed as an opportunity to construct the just world, or at least to re- build the world in the direction of justice. And if we can distribute the costs and benefits of that construction in the right way—shifting the burdens toward those who’ve inherited the liabilities of global racial empire and benefits toward those who’ve inherited claim rights upon it—then we can achieve reparations.