Feasibility - Aara Nanavaty
I was initially not entirely convinced about the constructivist argument for reparations, as I always separated the “oppressor” from the “oppressed.” However, as Taiwo outlines, our approach to reparations and history cannot be black and white. He distinguishes responsibility from liability - the latter which he uses to frame the constructivist argument about the “who.”
Responsibility asks to draw out clear groups of moral agents and creates a “fault and cause” (122) premise. For example, if I let my friend borrow my computer but they spill a drink on it, there are clear moral actions and agents involved. My friend fried my computer and thus is responsible for the damages. However, this is complicated on a global scale. Taiwo spends the first two chapters explaining the Global Racial Empire - as one caused by the Trans-Atlantic slave trade - has shaped the present world we live in. These systematic occurrences with the entire world involved dissolve any definite person or action one can associate with the scenario. Thus, one cannot pinpoint what specific aspects of that period or persons involved have shaped our present, nor specific aspects of the present or people alive today.
Liability, on the other hand, is a general “obligation.” With liability, “Rather than trying to punish a wrongdoer, we may instead find ourselves trying to build a world that distributes risk in the right way” (123). King points out that “we are all in the morally red” (122), and reducing people’s complex lives and identities into categories of “right” and “wrong” will complicate the problem at hand and further separate a world Taiwo hopes to bridge. While liability creates a future-standing premise that individuals in a world have an obligation to strive for a just future, it does not equally place the burden on everyone alike. This burden is also not viewed as a moral responsibility but as a plausibility. Whoever holds the higher advantage presently, as a result of the Global Racial Empire, should bear more of the costs. This, to my understanding, is due to the current resources the advantaged have and are able to expend.
While I do agree that just because an objective may not seem plausible is no reason to entirely dismiss the argument, the feasibility of this great feat makes me slightly reluctant. Rather than just focusing on the missing “how” part of this argument, I also wanted to continue the conversation above about the “who.” Before even starting to reflect on what we should do, as that is a task Taiwo shouldn’t necessarily take on himself, who is going to do all this work?
Slavery and colonialism didn’t just shape marginalized groups, but everybody who is alive today. As Taiwo states, this is “...everybody’s world order” (132), and thus being a global project, must involve the globe. On page 140, he outlines a general 3-step standard in approaching this project. For standard 2, he writes that first “A structural understanding of slavery, colonialism, and their legacy invites us to view the core wrongs of both the events and also the social structure built out of these” (143). How would we approach a structural understanding of our history if not everybody in the present day is even willing to accept it as a part of our history in the first place? In the United States alone, individuals are divided on teaching critical race theory in classrooms. Even if we take a Taiwo approach in erasing strict standards of responsible moral agents (as that was a major point contested in the critical race theory debate) - I’m not entirely convinced that people would agree to have this being taught. If this is unable to happen in our classrooms, where else would it happen? And how can we regulate it? Would regulation even be allowed?
On a global level, this would require the world to be on board. I don’t necessarily see Taiwo agreeing with only a “majority” of the world being on board with this project, as that defeats the purpose of a combined effort. Taiwo does point out that the specifics of reparations would differ from country to country (and instance to instance), but does the world have to be in general agreement of what the rest of the world is doing? Who exactly gets a say in all of this?
A constructivist approach to reparations is not one that is widely recognized yet, and Taiwo understandably may not be trying to tackle the entire problem in one go. Perhaps, this book is supposed to invite all the questions mentioned above. This is just a stepping stone, but the plausibility of the project seems less likely the more questions I ask.
Hey Aara! Great post; I appreciate your outline of the responsibility vs. liability. I think that you did a great job of distinguishing the two. While I agree that the whole issue is very complicated, I think the move from responsibility to liability makes the issue easier to tackle. I'm not sure which side of that argument your blog falls on, but you do bring up the question of who's going to do all the work. I think that with liability, it's much easier to determine who is going to have some of the burdens of work. With responsibility, there comes the weight of "fault" as you bring up. This makes it hard to identify who exactly should do the work because to do so, we in a sense have to prove people "guilty" of a "wrong." However, as you point out, liability is an "obligation" which I think is much easier to hold people to. Here, it is simply a moral duty to correct systems that have unfairly advantaged people while disadvantaging others. This reframe (I think) makes the whole project much more feasible in terms of getting people on board with reparations.
ReplyDeleteNext, I wanted to try to address your questions of the general feasibility. While I agree that Taiwo's view of reparations is global, I don't necessarily see it in the same way. Unlike Marx, Taiwo doesn't seem to argue that the reconstruction of a just world must happen with a simultaneous global revolt with everybody on board. The standards he sets forth on page 140 are what reparations should do. They provide goals for different systemic structures to address the problems. From my understanding, they do not say "if the system doesn't meet all these standards, it isn't valid." From our reading so far, it seems as though Taiwo supports progress. When talking about the start of rebuilding after World War Two, he describes it as a step in the right direction (I can't find the exact quote). I think that a construction project often takes multiple steps or phases to complete. So, maybe we don't need everybody in the world on board to start making progress towards a reparative justice system. It seems like steps towards the right outcome would be helpful overall given the interconnectedness of our systems.
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ReplyDeleteHi Aara, great blog post. You articulated many of the same concerns/questions I had while doing the reading. I think feasibility is particularly difficult for two reasons. First, as you mention, it requires a “historically informed view of distributive justice” (74). You brought up the debates over CRT in the US, and while I think that’s a good example, I actually think the US is probably ahead of the curve on this. Many other countries don’t even come close to sufficiently teaching about their own countries’ faults in history (Turkey and the Armenian Genocide, Britain and colonialism, Japan and the Rape of Nanking just to name a few examples). It’s hard to imagine a world in which policymakers and the public alike across all countries are both well-informed enough to possess a sufficient historical view distributive justice and pursue the reparations project Taiwo is talking about.
ReplyDeleteSecond, I think Taiwo’s Betty and Jessica story also illustrates some shortcomings of a reparations project in terms of feasibility. It’s hard to imagine that some combination of recognition and payment to Betty’s family would right all the historical wrongs, or even put them on an even playing field with Jessica’s grandchildren. So many of the resources that Jessica’s family had were intangible. It also seems hard to determine which of Jessica and Betty’s differences were due to race, which differences were due to class, which ones to individual agency, which ones to poor/good luck (even though minorities are disproportionately affected by criminal justice system, Reggie is still lucky that he was never arrested for his substance abuse disorder and got the appropriate treatment). The intersection between all these factors complicates things even further. Even more importantly, there is no way a policymaker could ever gather that much information about Betty and Jessica’s lives and do that on a macro-scale for everyone. Information deficits make policymaking very difficult, and righting historical injustices are a case where information deficits are vast.
I agree with your conclusion: this book should be viewed as useful in inviting the questions and positing a philosophical framework for looking at reparations, even if we were to run into problems of political feasibility while trying to apply it to the world.
Hi Aara, Eva, and Josh,
ReplyDeleteI think you all bring up important points about the feasibility of this constructivist approach to reparations. Aara, I agree that it might be difficult to get people to buy into a global effort of redistribution to amend an unjust accumulation of wealth based on race. However, I think at least in the United States, people might be more willing to address disproportionate accumulations of wealth based on class. While I agree that our problematic racial history needs to be addressed, and that the rest of the world eventually needs to buy into a global system of reconstruction, beginning to redistribute wealth in the United States might be a positive first step to addressing racial injustice. Going off of Eva’s point, I think small steps toward a more just world order still make a difference: because Taiwo’s whole theory of the current unjust world is based on the idea of accumulation, it follows that even small acts of redistribution will snowball to influence the futures of a far greater number of people.
Still, I do want to emphasize that economic reparations, long-term, are not sufficient means of addressing the global history of colonialism and racism. Subsequently, Josh, I want to address your point that “It’s hard to imagine that some combination of recognition and payment to Betty’s family would right all the historical wrongs.” I think Taiwo’s argument is, precisely, that the distribution of these resources will not properly address societal injustice. Rather, we need to reconstruct how useful those resources are to people given their natural and built environments. The goal is “not simply redistributing ‘stuff’ in order for everyone to have equal amounts of it, but rather of creating a world where the variations we are born with are all socially translated into lives rich in capabilities” (94). This capabilities approach to redistribution accounts for those intangible factors that you listed, because it doesn’t examine what exactly we have, but what those resources translate to in terms of our lived experiences.