Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is a philosopher by training and a public intellectual by vocation. He writes about climate and racial justice from his office at Georgetown University, where he is an associate professor. His widely acclaimed work focuses on reparations and elite capture, a term that describes how those perpetuating racial capitalism will co-opt the critique of it—by misusing the term identity politics, for example—to pit people against one another and further harm marginalized groups. Táíwò’s combination of depth and range is rare in the academy.

He was born in the Bay Area to Nigerian immigrants who’d moved there for graduate school in the late 1980s. They later relocated to Cincinnati, where Táíwò spent part of his childhood in an active Nigerian American community, and the other part in mostly white institutions. He went to white schools and Sunday churches, but also attended entirely Black African Bible study groups and discovered a social scene of African Americans and African immigrants. Those contrasts marked the Midwestern childhood of a self-­described nerd. His upbringing was framed by questions of belonging, as he navigated spaces of bigotry daily. He then majored in philosophy at Indiana University, and went on to pursue his graduate studies at UCLA, but not before taking a year off to try to become a professional musician. The saxophonic life didn’t pan out—he credits failing as a musician for its character-building success—but his studies of freedom, colonialism, and political philosophy earned him a PhD in 2018.