While I know this reading was a repeat for me, I was pleased to have the opportunity to reread it again with fresh eyes.
I feel as if a good commentary to compliment this reading would be to call back to Lawrence (2022)’s “Polycrisis may be a buzzword, but it could help us tackle the world’s woes.”; specifically, the part, “the world is tightly bound in a ”polycrisis”, a tangled knot of crises spanning global systems.”.
I bring this up because it is essentially what Táíwò describes while explaining the reach of his Global Racial Empire. The vestiges of colonialism are vast and deep, affecting various levels of human security; the wealth garnered through the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade kickstarting the industrial era, eventually snowballing into a climate crisis that is hitting the Global South harder than the North. Further, the extreme systemic inequality on both a macro level between the Global North and Global South, and micro level within both, based on class inequality due to the accumulative disadvantages affecting marginalized communities—specifically Black and Indigenous racialized communities — and accumulative advantages that has 1%-10% of the population making off like Scrooge McDuck. The latter demographic being largely white, who also happen to be the demographic hindering the possibility of getting anything under control out of mostly pure greed.
To put it simply, when you take a step back, it really does look like a tangled knot of crises all hitting a breaking point at once, doesn’t it?
References
Táíwò, O. O. (2022). Reconsidering reparations. In Oxford University Press eBooks. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780197508893.001.0001
Lawrence, M. M. (2022, December 11). ‘Polycrisis’ may be a buzzword, but it could help us tackle the world’s woes. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/polycrisis-may-be-a-buzzword-but-it-could-help-us-tackle-the-worlds-woes-195280
ma guarda quante stelle nel cielo 