How Racism Shapes Fashion’s Approach to Sustainability
What can we do to dismantle structurally racist approaches to sustainability? If we’ve benefited from race, class, or gender privilege: what are our implicit biases? How have we built these into our sustainable fashion solutions, policies, and institutions?
Published in
10 min readJul 17, 2020
Recent protests around the world speak to the ways white privilege is deeply ingrained in policy, institutions, and economic systems. As many white people seek to educate themselves on how they might have unwittingly perpetuated oppressive systems, so too must the fashion industry pause to re-consider how white privilege has shaped its approach to sustainable fashion.
What implicit racial biases do sustainable fashion advocates have?
I’m a white, female, millennial with Dutch and American parents. About five years ago, I went from a bleeding-heart liberal with a degree in human rights to a garment factory manager in Cambodia. I thought if I wanted to be effective in sustainable fashion spaces, I needed to better understand production.
