Saving Black people saves the world.

In order for us to save the planet, to save us all, we must save Black people. This is not tantamount to saying we must save Black people first or even we must only save Black people, which seem closer to the U.S.-focused, racial reparations debates. Instead, it is to say, much like Rodney, that Black people are a global people, inseparable from the tentacles of Western colonial rule.57 It is also to say, much like Davis, that to consider how Black people are affected in the United States and to solve such problems extends out to solving other problems as well. For example, both Davis and Atiya Husain contend that to end the militarization of policing in Black ghettoes could impact U.S. militarized approaches to the war on terror, which also has inspired other country’s approaches to the war on terror.58 In a similar vein, to take seriously the raced, gendered, and sexual assumptions of nature in our climate crisis discussions would not only point toward Black people, but toward the role of the Western-led climate crisis on the lives and futures of non-Western locales that have been deemed unworthy of saving by the West. In such a context, racial reparations are not solely about U.S. Black people, even as they are about us; reparations become inseparable from considerations of saving our environment—the time-space where we all live.