The Jewelry Industry Has a Problem

Portions of this post first appeared on Instagram on June 12, 2020

Black Lives Matter. Black lives with degrees and without; trans and cis Black lives; gay and hetero Black Lives; housed and houseless Black lives; Black lives in the United States and Black lives in the rest of the world.

Resist the temptation to return to a system that wasn’t working.

Resist the temptation to “get back to normal”; to feel settled, content & comfortable again, because this is not the time. It never was. 

The “normal” that came before was not sustainable, comfortable, settled, or content for many. 

This discomfort has a purpose & its purpose is change and growth. It is hard and it is vital. That growth, if we can invite it in, could result in a world and a system that is fair & just.

The jewelry industry has a problem. We talk mildly about “ethics”, “conflict-free” and “sustainability”, without calling out the root causes of our ills – racism and colonialism. Acknowledging these root causes could take us many steps closer to justice and fairness if we can acknowledge that the problem exists in the first place. We collectively need to stop shying away from this history, and we need to stop glossing over it with mild statements and actions.

Changes in the jewelry industry take a long time. Anyone who has been working on shifting our industry towards better and more transparent sourcing already knows that racism and colonialism are at the heart of the problem and that this stands in our way of making real progress. We, in our industry, profit off the exploited labor of marginalized Black, Brown, and Indigenous people around the world. Attempts to change this have been met with apathy, and efforts to create an inclusive, diverse, better industry at all levels of the industry have been and will be met with apathy. Count on it; find ways to fight it. It does not have to be like this.

Allow yourself to be called in. Even when you feel defensive, shamed, or hesitant. Do the work anyway. It’s going to be hard & you’ll have to do the work over & over again. Make it a daily practice. Fighting systemic racism has never been easy or neat, and we must do the work anyway. 

Action item for June 2020- pledge an ongoing donation to We Wield the Hammer – an organization dedicated to teaching metalsmithing to young women of African Descent. Classes (when people can gather again) in the Bay Area.

—Interested in learning more about the jewelry industry’s history? Start with this book, and move on to this one. Both are well-researched histories of the modern-day diamond industry. I do not receive any affiliate monies from these links, I just highly recommend these two books as a way to start learning about the history of the diamond industry.