Description
In the wake of the global racial justice uprisings of 2020, elite actors and institutions—from financial conglomerates such as Lloyd’s of London to collective initiatives like the “Heirs of Slavery”—have signalled moves away from imperial ignorance and toward a supposed reparative justice. They have entered a moral economy of racial reckoning. This paper interrogates these gestures as sites where liberal order seeks to recalibrate its moral legitimacy under the sign of accountability. Reading these practices through the lens of elite capture and moral economy, it examines how the move from imperial ignorance to responsibility-taking functions less as rupture than as a managed rearticulation of imperial reason. The paper asks what epistemic, affective and moral regimes underpin this shift, and how reparative discourse becomes domesticated. Finally, it situates these elite reckonings within the broader reactionary conjuncture—the “far-right” backlash against decolonial and reparative claims—to assess whether such moral economies can withstand or merely reproduce the contradictions of the liberal racial order. In doing so, the paper explores the limits of elite trajectories from imperial ignorance to responsibility.
