Looking to the Horizon: The Meanings of Reparations for Unbearable Crises

Abstract

Harms that arise from climate catastrophes deepen already unbearable forms of racial oppression. Both can be traced to accumulative ways of life that justified slavery and colonialism, which shifted into new forms of hegemony under liberal international law. A growing response has been to demand reparations. However, the meanings of reparations are vast and sometimes counterintuitive. This essay reflects on reparations claims emanating from the Caribbean, as one place where race and ecology converge. The Caribbean was forged by Indigenous genocide, the enslavement of African peoples, and the indentured labor of Asian peoples. Today, descendants in the region face subordination under liberal international law and climate catastrophes. Such conditions reveal that reparations are foremost a horizon of transformation away from accumulative ways of life that spread from Europe to the world, structuring the present reality. “Reparations” also refers to immediate justices that meet the demands of those who are harmed, because this prefigures the horizon of transformation by disrupting imperialism. These qualities dispel racializing critiques from the First World that reparations are irrational, or constitute politics separate from law. Reparations can enact legal relations that are meaningful to those “on the bottom,” and emancipatory for everyone, when communities and social movements define them.