The height of the COVID-19 pandemic made folks aware of a very rare fact: our modern understanding of vaccines is because of an underknown man named Onesimus. Sold into slavery and gifted to a Puritan Minister, it was observed that Onesimus was unscathed by ravenous smallpox, taking the lives of colonizers in the late 1700s. Onesimus shared how in his home country on the continent of Africa, they administered an inoculation, which shielded him from the disease. This precursor to the modern-day vaccine would ultimately save countless lives through the American colonies, and that knowledge still saves lives today.
From medicine to fashion, violence, theft, and erasure have resulted in Black contributions being intentionally invisible, treating Black communities as foreigners to their own innovations. To add insult to injury, Black culture and indigenous and native ways of being—often an offspring of being and survival—are praised when others adopt and appropriate with no attribution to Black genius. Cultural Sustainability Vanguard Dominique Drakeford explores with From Chains to Links how we ensure that the current and future generations of innovators are able to make their mark—and possess it.
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Dominique Drakeford, how are you?
I’m doing well.
I’m so excited to be having this conversation, this concept of the show. If you want to give them a little bit of backstory, how do we get here?
The real conversation was around starting with the Black Innovation ecosystem. We challenge ourselves to, “How is it different? What are we trying to change? What are we trying to disrupt?” For people that are reading, if you don’t know, the Black Innovation Alliance has this collective mission, and collective is a keyword, as to how it is that Black innovators, entrepreneurs, and creatives forge their way together to build a space that is really for us and by us. It’s not to use that term loosely, but we also recognize and practice it.
In some ways, the society that we’re in has us forget that we’re practicing it. It also shapes us to do things in a very individualistic way. The concept of building an ecosystem is in itself an aspiration against the system that wants us to do things like unicorns. We hate unicorns. The concept of constant competition as the way to succeed hasn’t worked for us.
We were vibing. We were talking. I was opening my mouth and was like, “I don’t know why we’re fighting with each other because the reality is we all have a similar bondage with either our cousins or our ancestors. We’re here from chains to links.” Everybody was like, “Oh.” It was not necessarily supposed to be a show. We’re going to put that on our beautiful team members at Carbon Thread, Kelly’s mind, and Studio Jay Lauren. The next thing I know, I looked on Slack and everyone was like, “This podcast that we’re doing is From Chains to Links.” I thought we were talking.
That’s how this show came about. It’s true. The challenge that we’re trying to give each other is what are the spaces that we can honor and call out that we’re not trying to build something, that we are it, and we’re building it. There is a difference between being a creative and working in collaboration with each other and creating that village versus all of us are dope and hashtag Black excellence. There’s a difference. I don’t have any issue with the latter. I’m saying there’s a difference.
Dominique, tell us. I’m so curious. I want to know a little bit more about you, but the beginnings. Where are your people from?
On the surface, I was born in Seattle, Washington. A lot of people don’t know that because I rep Oakland so hard. I was raised in Oakland, California, East Oakland to be exact. My dad is from Brooklyn, Brownsville. My mom is from Seattle, Washington. I’m in these Brooklyn streets. My family, from a cultural diasporic perspective, I’m Afro-indigenous on American soil. I don’t know where my roots are, whether they’re from the Caribbean, Africana, or somewhere on American Turtle Island soil. My heritage is Black Afro-American. I identify very strongly with the Black Panthers of Oakland. I claim the Oakland cultural aspect heavily.
I love it. Ife, where are your people from?
My people are from Nigeria. We are Igbo. In Nigeria, we are in the southern part of the country. One of the things that we also recognize is that Nigeria as a country was made up by the colonizers. Africans on the continent are naturally nomadic people. It’s very interesting. I had this conversation with my mother to see if they were interested in ways that don’t necessarily require them to trade their DNA to institutions or if they were interested in finding out the other parts of the continent that they’re from.
My mom and I have similar features. Our digits are smaller, for example, than my father’s. I’m curious like, “I wonder if there are some other indigenous communities or tribes that we may be connected to?” It’s just me and her. You have those extra long toes. I used to think that was weird. I was like, “Why are everybody else’s toes so long?” I then realized we were probably missing a knuckle in our toes. I was like, “We have small toes.” It’s my mom and I. I like to think of where your people are from as beyond the line or the territory. It’s cool what you can see in similarities when you look at people’s faces, noses, cheekbones, or whatever. That’s pretty cool.
I love that.
Where are your people from?
My people are from North Philadelphia.
We are from Trenton.
I’m told that my people are from South Carolina. There’s this whole story about how my maiden name is Felder. In this town in South Carolina, there are White Felders and Black Felders. That’s German-Jewish. You know the story. It’s a very common tale.
I know we have a lot to cover, but it makes me think about the fact that the lack of traceability to our roots in that way has been one of the most successful tools of colonization and unsustainability.
Here’s the thing, what I’ve been thinking about for a minute. It’s the same thing for White people. They can’t trace their lineage either.
They don’t want to.
Part of it is that is the trade-off with Whiteness. Your ancestors arrived here from Italy, Scotland, or Ireland. The trade-off was you leave all of that across the ocean, whether it be your language, your religion, your heritage, or your traditions, and you’re going to trade it in for this White card. This White card is going to take you to the front of the line, but you have to leave all that other stuff behind.
A lot of White people can’t trace their lineage either. That’s something that is quintessential to this new world experience that we haven’t really wrestled with because there’s a lot of trauma in that across the board. We as Black people have a lot more visibility into it because we understand the power of race in ways that White people do not. I’m sorry I took us down a rabbit hole. To your point, when did you first know you were Black in America?
Let me preface that by saying in Oakland where I grew up, I went to an all-Black elementary school. We learned Kwanzaa all the way to composting in a predominantly Black space. We had Black teachers. I lived in a middle-class to potentially upper-class community in Oakland. My village was Black. We had a Black soccer team. We had a Black swimming team. It was all Black everything before it was even coined that.
Blackness was so entrenched in my DNA. Having a village and tribe mindset was so ingrained in how I grew up and my approach to everything without even knowing it. I didn’t realize that there was this Black framing until I left elementary school and had to go to a predominantly White middle school. That’s when I started to conceptualize this ideology of Black.
Black American, taking it a step further, wasn’t truly until I left Oakland. It gets deep. I divided it. There’s this when you realized you were Black, but then when you realized you were Black American that was not until I left Oakland. In predominantly White spaces when I left elementary school in Oakland, I still didn’t feel the necessary pressures of being an American because the ecosystem of the Black Panthers live.
Community engagement, creativity, and cultural economics still were in the ethos of Oakland growing up. Once I stepped out and came to New York, and I’m not shitting on New York, I didn’t vibrate in my Blackness, my Black Americanness, the beauty of it, the joy of it, and the dopeness of it as high once I left and settled here. That’s when I realized.
There’s Black American, and then there’s Black in America. They’re akin and they overlap, but they’re not the same. In law school, I had a classmate who was from Rwanda. People were trying to drill down to her, “When you come here, you’re Black,” which is a whole separate conversation as to how the different experiences within the diaspora and when people identify with the Black experience here.
She described it in a way that’s similar to how my mom describes it, which is when everything around you is Black, you don’t necessarily see yourself as Black because your reference point is that everyone is you. Within that space, that means there are still some people you fuck with and you don’t fuck with. There’s a range of personhood, but it’s not on the range of the color spectrum and then the things that come as a result of the color spectrum.
When you said, “When I left Oakland,” we don’t talk enough about how there are spaces that are also spaces of abundance that exist in villages that are here that when people leave, that’s when the awareness of both Black American or Black in America hits you. There’s this thing that people aspire to in being American. It’s almost like the covering of Blackness left you when you left Oakland. It’s like, “I’m in America. I was in my village. Now, I’m in America.” It’s very interesting how you describe that.
Also, what’s interesting is trying to find other Black Americans in a place where the diversity of Blackness is so rich here. That was an interesting experience as well. I’m coming, thinking, “You’re Black. We’re all Black.” There was no division of Blackness to me. Coming here and realizing that there were divisions of Blackness was an interesting experience. That was one of the most interesting culture shocks. I know a lot of people get the question, “Where are you from?” I’m like, “I’m from Oakland.” They’re like, “Where are you from?” I’m like, “I’m from Oakland.” Those conversations intercommunally became very interesting, but I digress. We do need to have those conversations more within our various tribes.
That’s the purpose of this show. It’s for us to have those hard conversations that we need to have because our inability to have these conversations has us stuck. I feel like in the Black community, there’s this sense that at some point, we need to have a family reunion where we all meet in Idaho or something and we close the door so that White folks don’t hear what we’re talking about. That’s why we struggle to have these conversations and open spaces like social media because we’re so scared that White folks are going to peek in and hear us working through our mess. We have to figure it out.
We need to have interdisciplinary conversations.
I want to hear more about your work around sustainability. Ife, do you want to linger here a little bit?
It’s almost like Black to the Future a bit. I want to talk about it broadly because this is an innovation show. In some ways, we’re already talking about culturally and sub-culturally how we innovate or how even differences have been innovated as a result of Black. When you talk about going into a space and Black people identify themselves as also belonging to villages, it’s belonging to villages as a form of separation at times versus linking as a form of connectivity. That is not any fault. That’s the design of Black versus Blackness, which is very interesting.
I feel like when I hear Black, it’s who we are. Some of it is what’s been labeled on us, and some of it is who we are. Blackness is how we jump rope. It’s how we connect. Sometimes, you talk about the Black card, but I’m like, “It’s really the Blackness card.” When I feel Blackness, there’s less cocoa butter that’s shake. I can laugh. We can do UNO.
It’s a universal language, for sure. It’s a spirit. It’s a language.
I want to know as a generational though.
Why do you say that?
You know these little Black and Brown babies being brought up in middle-class environments. I think about the tweens in my life who are raised in predominantly White spaces. There’s little about their experience that in any way mimics how I grew up. It’s not to say that how I grew up is a normative thing, but it is to say, “Should I be concerned that you are interested in anime and K-pop?” A lot of middle-class Black folks are raising little kids that are into anime and K-pop. It isn’t a bad thing, but I don’t think they know the Black national anthem. I don’t think that they know their Black heroes or their history. I don’t think they know how to jump rope or UNO. They know Dungeons and Dragons.
For Dungeons and Dragons, it depends on the disposition of the person.
There is nothing wrong with it. When I think about quintessentially Black, that doesn’t surface to the top. Is that even a fair conversation to have?
Not the quintessentially Black. This is the thing. Quintessentially Black is an invention and is also subjective as hell. What I am hearing from you though is there are certain things that you feel are the must-haves that they aren’t having. I’m going to parse a little bit because we’re both Jersey girls and you said middle class.
There’s also something about poor Black folks that experience, and this is my opinion, the majority of the negative disparities of Blackness, but they also are the ones that are in spaces of forced creativity because of poverty. Some of it is looking at folks that you feel like, “These fools have everything. They haven’t made syrup sandwiches,” which is a Black innovation. You’re like, “They haven’t made cheese tortilla.”
They don’t know anything about no great Kool-Aid or no Red Kool-Aid.
They should know that. That’s exposure. Why are you not exposed? Do you watch these tweens in your space and don’t help them out? Do you leave them out to the wild?
A lot of these kids are probably seeing this through social media, which is weird. They’re not experiencing it. Granny’s plastic on the couch, you didn’t experience that?
With granny’s plastic on the couch, you wake up and your thighs are sweating.
The thought of it makes my thighs sweat.
I didn’t like it.
You didn’t sit in Mama’s lap and get your hair yanked and scalp greased?
My grandmother lived in North Philadelphia. When it was hot, you went outside and you turned on the fire hose. Somebody’s uncle turned on the fire hose and you sat in the middle of the street, played with little plastic potato chip bags, and threw them at your cousins. They were like water balloons. That was your water party.
That was your entertainment.
They don’t know anything about that, turning on the fire hose and having Black parties.
We also didn’t know that they were saving their electric bills because we didn’t come back to the house before 5:00. Everybody was outside.
A lot of it was resourcefulness and sustainability before.
Let’s get into the sustainability. I have a very broad question. This conversation is about sustainability as a birthright and innovation as a birthright. Even when you hear that juicy title, do you consider sustainability a birthright? What is our relationship to sustainability?
Absolutely. Blackness is synonymous with sustainability. All of the things that you were talking about with regards to the cultural relics of how we grew up, virtually, all of that is sustainability. It’s from hair, hair care, skin, skincare, reusing, upcycling, hand-me-downing, joy, double-dutching, and saving plastic bags in the junk drawer under the sink.
I don’t use my trash because the trash goes in the bag that is on the doorknob.
It’s all of these.
You bring out the trash can when you have company.
I took the plastic bag because I didn’t have a head cap. The plastic bag was for my conditioner to condition the scalp follicles. All of these experiences from the past to the present are sustainability. It is our birthright that we must reclaim. That, I feel like, is one of the most important conversations. We need to reclaim the traumatic aspects of our cultural experience as well as the joyous aspects. All of that is this beautiful lasagna of sustainability. If we start to almost reprogram our thinking that liberation, justice, and all of that which we are fighting for organically and also intentionally, that is synonymous with sustainable justice or sustainability. It is our birthright.
Dominique, I’m curious. talk us through conceptually. When you talk about sustainability, what keeps coming to the back of my mind is scarcity. It’s almost like they’re two sides of a coin. Some would say, “Folks were doing that because it was never enough.” You were always scared that you would run out of something, so you would need some backup. It’s almost like the people who hunker down because they think it’s about to be the end of the world. It’s not that extreme, but I’m curious. Is there a relationship between sustainability and scarcity, or is it a mindset thing of how you think about it?
100%. Scarcity is a huge pillar of sustainability. It goes back to what I was talking about regarding being resourceful. If we are conserving water because it will save money on a bill, it’s also going to help conserve water, which is a scarce resource. A lot of times, it’s all about how we frame it, how we contextualize it, and how we give texture to the word or the ideology.
In some respects, sometimes, scarcity is a reality. We live in a moment where anytime you see a scarcity mindset, it’s a negative thing. We live in abundance. What I’m hearing you saying, and get me right if not, is that in some instances, scarcity is a reality.
In a lot of incidents, scarcity is a reality.
If I could add to that, it also sounds like the way we’ve messed with these words is that in a capitalist society, abundance also means consumption. That’s where the friction is. Especially with the movement that you lead with Sustainability Brooklyn where we talk about fast fashion, toxic dyes, and sweatshops, all of this is to continue creating what people “want,” which is abundance. Abundance, we’ve equated that with consumption. The flip side is we technically should have a society where there’s enough water and enough food for everyone.
Enough and quality.
Enough, quality, and access. We technically should have those things, i.e. equity, but there is a friction between our desire to live and, in some ways, showing that we live in abundance versus respecting our resources as abundant for all but also scarce to be protected. It’s not scarce as in we should be afraid. It’s scarce as in what can we do to co-exist with our society with what we have?
I feel like sustainability from a justice perspective versus sustainability from this very Novo fashion perspective, that’s where I see the difference in what you all are innovating versus the industry of sustainability. I would love for you to touch on how sustainability increasingly becomes a niche space that we get pushed out of when you’ve already laid the foundation that we created. It’s synonymous with Blackness, so why are we not there? Why are we not in that space to be leading that work? It’s not even at the table, but to be leading the conversation.
To echo what you were saying, let’s be crystal clear. A lot of times, our community frames a scarcity mindset as a negative. In this regard, we need to think of the scarcity mindset as being abundant because we are living in kin with our natural world. We’re living in kin with each other. We are creating beautiful regenerative ecosystems. That’s very much rooted in culture. You’re tethering this idea of being scarce, but being scarce to live abundantly. Folks don’t talk about sustainability like that at all.
That’s right.
We’re trying to run away from the scarce moments. It’s some of what we talked about. Even when we look at these young people, and if we’re honest, I’ll speak for myself, it’s the trauma of Blackness. I’m like, “You haven’t gone through Black yet. You haven’t gone through this yet.” The flip side is we go through these weird, twisted pipelines to think that we also have to acquire certain things to show, “I am no longer living in scarcity,” which is very different from, “Minimalism helps me breathe better. It helps me think better.” We don’t think about the psychology of it until it’s too late, but we get a lot of stuff.
I’m about to fuck your head up really quickly. Minimalism, yes. Having less and consuming less is a very beautiful thing. We’re contributing less to toxic production models. We have less in our way to distract us and disrupt our flow. It also causes a conversation of maximalism. I’m pro-maximalism and sustainability too. I also want to give praise to folks who have collected stuff from their ancestors or their grandma, or life experiences that bring them joy or that keep them grounded. That is also a form of sustainability.
It is not necessarily that they went out and started buying shit and were meaningless. There are ways not to be a minimalist and have a lot of stuff, but have it be intentional and meaningful, and keep you, your family, and the next generation grounded. You’ve been with your auntie who got the mud cloth over here. There’s sustainable power in that.
We fall into these very monolithic, tunnel vision conversations like sustainability equals minimalism. I’m trying to get us to have a paradigm shift in understanding that the various versions of Blackness and how we show up, whether it’s minimal or maximal, are both intrinsically important and rooted in our DNA to develop better sustainable systems.
This is wild because as you’re talking, I’m thinking of all the wild shit our relatives collect. It could be the auntie that has mugs with cats on them.
You may not personally be a fan. I’m not a fan of all of my auntie’s relics. I’m like, “Lord Jesus, you got to get rid of some of this.”
It has meaning to the person. I love the conversation about where your people are from, but it’s also a struggle as somebody who was born here and did not grow up where my people were from. The thing that connects me to where my people are from is my dad’s records. My dad has a crazy record collection. You can see the records if you were to line them up by years as to the experience before I was born, his spiritual experience, and the experience of the good old ‘80s.
It’s this arc of if it wasn’t for his collection of stuff, that may have been a hard question to ask me as far as “Where are your people from?” I would’ve been able to point to maybe a region but not necessarily an experience. I understand his experience more. He is a musician as what it was to, in some ways, trade being a musician for being an immigrant in America. The one thing that he never stopped collecting was music.
The minimalist narrative would be like, “You only need two records.” I want us to continue to encourage us to unlearn some of these frameworks of what White sustainability has been teaching us.
Earlier in the conversation, you referenced Turtle Island, which native people believe is their origin story. Not all, but there are many native communities that believe the story of Sky Mother. Sky Mother fell from the sky, into the sea, and onto the back of the turtle. The turtle grew. The turtle is what we call America. Hence, Turtle Island.
I’ve been doing some research for a book that I’m working on. It’s about the Iroquois Confederacy, which is the most long-standing democracy. It’s longer than our democracy. It’s the oldest democracy in the Western hemisphere that we are aware of. The Iroquois Confederacy believes that when you’re making a decision, it has to make sense not just for the current generation, but for seven generations forward.
I thought that was such a powerful concept, this notion of only making decisions that will have positive implications not just for your children, your grandchildren, or your children’s children’s, but their children’s children’s children’s children. I feel that there’s so much to learn because the way that we approach life is the opposite of that in Western culture. It’s like, “What’s good for me right now?” which is the ugly side of liberty. It’s all about me and what I want. It has nothing to do with the collective. I’m curious. What are some philosophical principles that might help us to ground in thinking around sustainability and what we as a community need to model?
I believe wholeheartedly that there is importance in the individual as well as the community collective, but there has to be a bridge to both. Individualism is not part of our ancestral lineage. In this society, when we’re looking at this kaleidoscope of ecosystems, there’s an internal ecosystem that we have to acknowledge and that we have to build a relationship with. That is individual sustainability that we have to understand, whether that is our breath or our personal health. Anything that’s going on that builds who you are and how you take up space is important.
The individualism bit of sustainability is crucial. I don’t want to be one of those people who’s like, “Fuck individualism.” There’s space for that. That individual sustainability and tending to your internal ecosystem has to directly connect with the community ecosystem. You have to understand whether you have to take an ethnographic approach to understand what’s going on in your circle of influence.
The outside ecosystems, you have to connect with them spiritually and physically. You have to be intentional about what that bridge looks like, what it feels like, and the texture of it. All of that is important. I don’t necessarily have a philosophy around it, but it is equally important to focus on an individual ecosystem in a way that bridges to collective ecosystems.
It sounds like you’re talking a lot about practice. A lot of sustainability is about how you practice it. What I love about that individual ecosystem is something shifted for me. When you are working so hard to separate yourself from the practices of White dominant culture, for those of us that subscribe to that, there is this bit of running away from yourself that happens or at least running away from wanting other than self-care, which I even struggle with. We’ve had a conversation about how I struggle with that term a little bit at times.
What I’m leaning toward with community care is it doesn’t erase the self, but it does mean that I am also part of a community. The being and the wellness of myself, I have to believe that it matters to the community and that community also is invested in how individuals are doing when they’re by themselves. Sustainability broadly is something that as people, we do master in practice, but we don’t necessarily call it out nor do we congratulate each other for taking care of ourselves.
Even as we’re talking about innovation, I’m so curious as to the many different ways people are being sustainable on a daily basis that aren’t even acknowledged for not just their genius and their survival, but also the way that the community benefits from them individually being well. As you were talking, I was like, “That’s something that is not necessarily being brought out as a part of the conversation.”
As you were speaking, I had thoughts about my birth. I wasn’t going to get into this, but I’m going to tap into it a little bit because it aligns with a lot of what we’ve been discussing. For folks who don’t know, I had two at-home births that were unmedicated and low intervention a few years ago and then again a couple of months ago. I consider my birth one of the most sustainable collaborations that I’ve ever done.
It’s important that I frame it as a collaboration because it’s one of the few things. It’s the start of practice. It’s the start of a practice that I’ve been able to experience and go through that bridged the past, present, and future. I collaborated with my ancestors, myself, my fiance, my sister, and my community, and then I collaborated with the future, which were my children. It was this very circular moment of bridging past, present, and future. It made me think, “I need to congratulate myself. I want to thank me for doing me.”
You popped out two babies with no medication. I congratulate you publicly.
Nobody can tell me a damn thing virtually about anything at that point. It was a case study, an example, or however you want to frame it of a collaborative, sustainable moment that transcends moments. It was an example of how we need to congratulate ourselves. What does collaboration look like? How can this be a catalyst for the next generation?
I talk about my home birth specifically for Black folks who want to potentially engage in alternative experiences of birth that connect past, present, and future. There are moments like that that are so beautiful, but they can be an example of circularity. Black birthing experiences are so much rooted in Blackness and sustainability.
It goes back to the conversation we had. Almost everything that we do is sustainable. It’s about reclaiming that because the mainstream sustainability space has not only tried to snatch our birthright of sustainability from us but also tried to manipulate us into thinking that it’s not who we are. It’s deeper than erasure. Erasure is a fucked up action, but erasure on top of manipulation is what we need to understand when we’re looking at sustainability discourse and Blackness.
We are at a pivotal point. The world is fucked. I’m not trying to be on some scare tactics, but it is beyond time for us to reclaim sustainability for environmental justice. I’m not talking about the environment, like the air quality or the water quality. Environmental justice also embodies how police treat us, how we treat each other, wellness, and well-being. It encompasses what we eat. It encompasses what brings us joy. It encompasses triggers and traumas. It’s not just the environment in the sense of the atmosphere.
When you share that birthing story, and this is before you get on what we call the soapbox moment, there’s a reason why we call this show an innovation show. It’s not necessarily an invention show. When people think of innovation, oftentimes what gets rewarded is what people “invent” or what people think they’re inventing, which oftentimes, they’re Columbusing, but that’s a separate conversation.
As we’re talking about sustainability, innovation and sustainability go hand in hand because they’re really about how people organically respond to their environments, well or not, and at least attempt to make it. I’m going to be very controversial. Even when I think about the various tools that people use to keep their communities safe, through another lens, you can look at it like gun violence. You can look at it like gangs. To somebody else’s definition, they’re looking at it as protection. They’re looking at it as, “I’m responding to the fact that there isn’t protection here.” I’m not an advocate for the violence. I am saying that people do innovate based on the resources that they have.
Sustainability is also about, going back full circle, what people have in their environment to survive. These conversations that we’ve been having about abundance and scarcity are all important conversations to have because there is a policy component. When we talk about even these large global conversations around sustainability, which have deep implications for fem folk and these implications for the global south, they’re often responding to being in harmful conditions not because they want to, but because they’re in spaces that they have to respond to what the environment allows them to respond.
In some ways, even the conversation around whether it’s minimalism or maximalism is still about what you have access to and what you can enjoy. I really honor that you had a community and a tribe to innovate what you needed to innovate even if it’s to serve as a model for your children. Without those models of sustainability or at least calling out sustainability, it can be difficult to know that it could be a practice of scarcity. It could also be a practice of sustainability as we are responding and doing the best we can with what we have.
As we wrap, I wanted to allow you to get into whether you call it a soapbox or a standing message as to how you want the audience to know as far as not just about Black innovation but also Black liberation. What is the thread between sustainability, innovation, and liberation? What does that feel like for you? What feels right for you?
I want to broaden the scope of innovation as it relates to sustainability. I want Black folks in all of your texturedness to know and go through some portals of education to know that we are innovation. We are technology in the rawest sense. I’m always back and forth between my ancestors and the present day. Our ancestors’ hands when they were growing food is technology. Our intellectual property to come up with ways that we can protect our community is technology.
When somebody creates shea butter that’s going to heal our skin, that’s technology. When we are trying to come up with ways to put food on a table due to scarcity, that’s technology. It’s so important to desensitize and unlearn what we thought we knew about sustainability and say, “Fuck what mainstream White Western Eurocentric BS has been telling us about sustainability and has been making us feel absent and excluded from the conversation.”
It’s important to find ways to understand how you are technologically savvy, whether it’s with your body or through intellectual property, and then begin to create a personal and community-oriented rubric that makes sense for not only your survival but joy. I know we talk about survival a lot in Black spaces, and that’s because of trauma, but we also have to tether survival with joy, especially when we’re talking about sustainability. There is no liberation if the fibers aren’t woven into what makes us happy and what continues to heal us.
I say all of that to say we have to create unapologetic rubrics for what sustainability means to us and what it feels like to us. We have to create a song about what sustainability means to you and to the community. You will see that it is beautiful, healing, and not what you thought it was. I can go on, but we’ll leave there.
We do want you to share with people where they can find you and where they can get to you. Right after that, I have to ask you this. Who is your favorite Black innovator?
What’s first? My contacts?
Let’s start with contacts.
You can easily have some access to me through social media, Instagram in particular. My handle is @DominiqueDrakeford. We’ll leave it at that. I also have a DominiqueDrakeford.com website under construction. You can connect with me there or through the organization that I co-founded with Whitney, SustainableBrooklyn. The Instagram handle is @SustainableBK. You can contact me there as well.
Who is your favorite Black innovator, real or fictional or alive or dead?
I have several because I’m multidimensional. At the top of my list, without question, is Missy Elliot. Missy Mother F-ing Elliot is one of my favorite innovators coming straight from Virginia. She has transcended the industry and was a nucleus in my early years of sustainable development in self-discovery and finding moments of joy.
She told me that I can unapologetically be myself. She told me through her energy and her spirit that I can be myself in the sustainability space. A lot of the space is very cream. A lot of the space, especially when we’re talking about sustainable fashion, which is my wheelhouse, looked one way. In order to be in sustainable fashion, you have to wear browns, tans, and greens. That’s it. Hip-hop culture is very much sustainable as fuck.
In her first video, she was in a trash bag and a hair comb. It doesn’t get more sustainable than that. She was also a full-figured woman.
With brown skin.
Thick lips and everything. Missy is our icon. We don’t do enough. We’re not right.
Thank you, Dominique.
Thank you so much, Dominique.
Thank you.
We appreciate all that you do and all that you mean.
Thank you for all that you do and all that you are.
Thanks, everybody, for joining us for this episode of the show. I hope you got something out of it and will join us for our next episode. In the meantime, you can find us at BlackInnovationAlliance.com. Peace.
