Beyond Heroes & Holidays | Reconsidering Reparations: Author Talk with Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò
Date and Time
Oct 22, 2025 6:30 pm
Location
14th & V
2021 14th St NW, Washington, District of Columbia, 20009
Oct 22, 2025 6:30 pm
14th & V
Join us on October 22 at 6:30pm at Busboys and Poets (14th & V) to hear from author Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, in conversation with Jenice L. View, on his book, Reconsidering Reparations: Why Climate Justice and Constructive Politics Are Needed in the Wake of Slavery and Colonialism. Táíwò offers a clear, new case for reparations as a “constructive,” future-oriented project: one that responds to the weight of history’s injustices with just distributions of benefits and burdens. Centuries ago, Táíwò explains, European powers engineered the systems through which advantages and disadvantages still flow. Colonialism and transatlantic slavery forged schemes of injustice on an unprecedented scale — a world order he calls “global racial empire.” The project of justice must meet the same scope.
Táíwò describes how the global racial empire took up industrialism and fossil fuel burning that now fuse reparations with preventing runaway climate change. Environmental catastrophes echo past injuries. “If we don’t intervene powerfully,” he writes, climate change “will reverse the gains toward justice that our ancestors fought so bitterly for.” But this calculus discourages despair; it demands global resistance.
Reconsidering Reparations suggests policies, goals, and organizing strategies. And it leaves readers with brilliant advice: Act like an ancestor. Do what we can to shape the world we want our moral descendants to inherit, and have faith that they will continue the long struggle for justice.
This event is part of the Beyond Heroes & Holidays series, co-hosted by Busboys and Poets and Teaching for Change.
The book will be available for purchase and signing. Food and drinks can be purchased from the Busboys and Poets menu throughout the event.
Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University. He received his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of California Los Angeles. He has published in academic journals ranging from Public Affairs Quarterly, One Earth, Philosophical Papers, and the American Philosophical Association newsletter Philosophy and the Black Experience.
Táíwò’s theoretical work draws liberally from the Black radical tradition, anti-colonial thought, German transcendental philosophy, contemporary philosophy of language, contemporary social science, and histories of activism and activist thinkers.
His public philosophy, including articles exploring intersections of climate justice and colonialism, has been featured in The New Yorker, The Nation, Boston Review, Dissent, The Appeal, Slate, Al Jazeera, The New Republic, Aeon, and Foreign Policy. He is the author of Elite Capture and Reconsidering Reparations.
Jenice L. View is an associate professor emerita at George Mason University. For more than 40 years, View has worked with a variety of educational and nongovernmental organizations, including a D.C. public charter school, the Just Transition Alliance, Rural Coalition, the Association for Community Based Education, and LISTEN, Inc. to create space for the voices that are often excluded from public policy considerations: women, people of color, poor urban and rural community residents, and especially youth. She has a B.A. from Syracuse University, an MPA-URP from Princeton, and a Ph.D. from the Union Institute and University.
FREE AND OPEN TO ALL
