12/09/2020
Fast fashion is borne from consumerism and capitalism. The sibling of capitalism, racism, rejoices when his brother thrives. When his brother thrives, so does he.
Garments from many of the brands you love are NOT produced by white, well paid workers... They are produced by (mostly) woman and children of colour in other countries. They are produced in barbaric working conditions. They are produced from the actual blood, sweat, and tears of human beings. This is not acceptable. You may not care about the climate and fast fashion's impact on our home. It may be easier to nurture your ignorance than to confront a burning planet. But if you care about people, then cut back the buying.
"Prince Henry’s Portugal birthed conjoined twins—capitalism and racism—when it initiated the transatlantic slave trade of African people. These newborns looked up with tender eyes to their ancient siblings of sexism, imperialism, ethnocentrism, and homophobia. The conjoined twins developed different personalities through the new class and racial formations of the modern world. As the principal customers of Portuguese slave traders, first in their home country and then in their American colonies, Spain adopted and raised the toddlers among the genocides of Native Americans that laid the foundational seminaries and cemeteries on which Western Europe’s Atlantic empire grew in the sixteenth century. Holland and France and England overtook each other as hegemons of the slave trade, raising the conjoined twins into their vigorous adolescence in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The conjoined twins entered adulthood through Native and Black and Asian and White slavery and forced labor in the Americas, which powered industrial revolutions from Boston to London that financed still-greater empires in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The hot and cold wars in the twentieth century over resources and markets, rights and powers, weakened the conjoined twins—but eventually they would grow stronger under the guidance of the United States, the European Union, China, and the satellite nations beholden to them, colonies in everything but name. The conjoined twins are again struggling to stay alive and thrive as their own offspring—inequality, war, and climate change—threaten to kill them, and all of us, off." - Ibram X. Kendi: How to be an Antiracist.