This is a HeadGum podcast.

Hello and welcome to Factually, I'm at the

Atom 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 a shocked and as dismayed as so many of you are and

you know that's that's all I have to say about 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 is 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 you know 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 let us there et cetera so that 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 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 the 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 tonahashi coats wrote an article for the Atlantic and excellent.

One called the case for reparations a couple of years ago which really jumped started that conversation and it's only grown sense 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 a 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 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 a

man's 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 olfemi Thai well 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 an 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 olfemi Thai well

femi thank you so much for being here 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

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 of 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 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

I mean that is a lot broader and of a vision than you know like the sort of view of reparations I grew up with was like okay well you know black American 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 sort of embedded in the word reparations hey we're gonna make a reparation for a wrong previously done

but yeah this is a much like broader view that like tell me more about what you mean about the transit transatlantic slave trade creating the world because I think I know what you mean but I want to I want to hear you say it

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