It was refreshing to read Ken Pucker’s analysis of fashion’s role in the climate emergency and how businesses have committed to circular propaganda despite remaining wedded to profits. Yet, while it is laudable that sustainability experts and corporate professionals like Pucker have begun to scrutinize linear business models, they continue to overlook the long-existing ecosystem of Black, brown, and Indigenous thought and action on circularity.
As a Black woman with more than 15 years of experience as an independent researcher and nontraditional educator, I have been advocating for a paradigm shift in sustainability to center the ideas and practices of decolonization. Currently, every predominant aspect of sustainability discourse and practice is white-centered. Critiques like Pucker’s fail to consider how white supremacy and colonization—centuries of slavery systems that have built the global capitalist economy, the extraction of Indigenous land and its resources, and the continuous exploitation of Black and brown intellectual property—affect circularity efforts.
The compounding devastation of our climate crisis—from dire reports about carbon emissions to increasingly frequent extreme weather—should compel us to address its intersecting root causes of colonization, racism, and capitalism. Instead, leaders in sustainability are fixated on tweaking the stems, branches, and leaves of the tree, rather than addressing fashion’s colonial system and the capitalist nutrients that keep the invasive tree alive.
Sustainability experts, for example, continue to call for supply-chain transparency. But criticizing the supply chain of corporate businesses, dismissing rote environmental reports that give a nod to decarbonization tactics, and disassembling accountability tools (e.g., certifications) that provide no standardized metrics are low-hanging fruit. These critiques have become redundant and, arguably, have led to no significant improvement in how business is done or in saving our environment. I call this selective focus on secondary climate contributors and their effects our “colonial climate crisis” and believe it is our biggest barrier to circularity.
Circularity efforts will continue to flounder until we scrutinize colonization and create an analytical framework grounded in the intellectual property and expertise of racially marginalized people. As I write in my forthcoming book on Black cultural sustainability, this framework must account for the systemic effects of colonialism, anti-Black racism, and environmental racism, and it must also incorporate eco-reparations for Black and Afro-Indigenous descendants of chattel slavery.
Those in the fashion industry seeking to address the root causes of and generate solutions to our climate crisis can begin by asking the following questions:
- What did regenerative-fabric industries and textile technology look like before colonization?
- How did the transatlantic slave trade finance the “cotton boom” and give rise to today’s multibillion-dollar fashion industry?
- How did capitalism, European expansionism, and the industrial revolution initiate and contribute to the resource depletion, waste, and disposability of Black agriculture, textile labor, and intellectual property?
- What are the factors that keep resource depletion and labor exploitation alive through the practices of land extraction and dispossession and Native displacement?
- How does anti-Blackness shape sustainability discourse?
- Who is creating the metrics and analytical frameworks used to assess sustainability?
- How are eco-reparations important to reversing the colonial climate crisis?
- Who are the Black and Indigenous vanguards who created the templates for sustainability development, and how can we equitably integrate their practices and ideas into broader systems change?
These questions tackle what I believe to be the three pillars maintaining the current system of colonization: policy (controlling access); education (controlling information); and marketing (controlling perception). They also demand that each person assess their sources and networks of knowledge to begin the work of decentering whiteness from their sustainability work. Only by researching; investing in; learning from; and equitably centering Black, brown, and Indigenous knowledge and practice can our sustainability work have deep impact. We must decolonize circularity to produce a shift in our collective mindset and politics.
Read more stories by Dominique Drakeford.