- White supremacy culture is the story running underneath most of what we have been taught to call normal business.
- Business as usual is not neutral: it was built to concentrate power and extract, and it still works.
- Marketing is where it does its loudest work, running on manufactured fear, scarcity and urgency.
- Start a business without doing your own decolonial shadow work and you rebuild the old world in softer language.
As a white person, I come from a lineage of colonizers. I and my ancestors have benefited from hundreds of years of colonization.
I am a student of the decolonial movement. My teachers include Dr. Rocío Rosales Meza, Tricia Hersey, bell hooks, Ashanti Kunene, and Alisha Morris.
I have learned that this is lifelong work for me, of unlearning and divesting from my white colonial mind.
It is my souls calling, and my ancestral responsibility as a white person, to bring an end to the colonial paradigm and shine light on the ways in which we white folks continue to unconsciously collude and uphold systems of oppression.
Most of you reading this will agree: stories shape our reality.
Our narratives build entire worlds.
And the one that’s been running the show for the longest and is the root cause of all suffering?
White supremacy culture.
The dominant white narratives that have shaped culture for centuries force everyone to play by the same hidden rules, values tasks over people, leaves people isolated and ignores ‘other’ valuable perspectives.
Those patterns aren’t mine, by the way. Tema Okun named them back in 1999, with the late Kenneth Jones, in White Supremacy Culture. I’m just dragging them into business.
I think, and I hope, we’d all collectively agree that these things SUCK.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg…
White supremacy culture benefits NO ONE. Seriously, not even the 1%. You know why?
BECAUSE IT’S DESTROYING ITSELF.
Even if they do build a rocket and fuck off to Mars, they’ll eventually fuck that up as well…
And guess what? I don’t agree with it.
WTF is “Business as Usual” and Why Does it Suck So Hard?
You know what else builds worlds, tells stories and shapes reality and culture?
BRANDS AND BUSINESS.
Yup. That’s why I’m always banging on about how important your branding and marketing is to actually build a business (and a world) in alignment with your values.
“Business as usual” (BAU) is predominantly a white, colonial, capitalist, patriarchal paradigm (bell hooks’ phrase, and she said it better) that looks like common sense, and “the way business is just done”.
It looks neutral, but it sure as hell ain’t.
It was designed and built to concentrate power, exploit human labor, and extract natural resources, directly driving global crises like climate change and systemic inequality.
And it’s working, very VERY well.
When a healer or a new earth practitioner starts a business and doesn’t do their own decolonial shadow work first, we don’t escape the old paradigm and birth the new earth.
We unconsciously recreate the old world, except this time it sounds a lot more inclusive, and healed, and love and light…
But it isn’t.
The offer gets a beautiful name, the launch follows the moon, the brand palette is earthy and soft, and underneath it is the same funnel, the same false scarcity, the same countdown timer, the same growth-at-any-cost.
If that paragraph just described your own business, you’re welcome to message me about it. Only you’ll know if now is the time.
And this isn’t about blame or shame, I’m simply trying to shine a light on this.
I myself have fallen into the same traps and delusions along the way, and will likely continue to do so. Like I said, this is lifelong work.
I’ll probably look back on this article in a few years from now and cringe at the righteousness or subtle saviorism accidentally woven into it. Eeek…
But this isn’t about perfection, that’s another white colonial supremacy narrative that causes a lot of harm. And a lot of complicit silence too.
What I’m attempting to do here is illuminate the mindset we were all raised inside, running quietly in the background. Which is what collusion actually looks like in practice: it’s not a conscious choice, a default mechanism.
That’s why Dave and I built The Other Way. To help new earth visionaries build the stories, structure and systems, not just the New Age aesthetic.
We support businesses that are in right relationship, in how they sell as well as what they sell.
Because our brands and businesses hold the power to change the world, to define the reality we live in.
So we have to bring light to the shadows that are unconsciously upholding the very systems we say we want to end.
That’s what it takes to actually birth the new earth.
Just for fun-sies, here is a breakdown of how these intersecting dominant narratives shape our power structures, business operations, and marketing practices, ultimately contributing to widespread human suffering because #YOLO:
How the Old Paradigm Quietly Shapes Our Business Operations
BAU has a colonial and capitalist inheritance with a few hundred years behind it, and it’s doing exactly what it was designed to do. Move wealth upward, extract until there’s nothing left, and call it success.
- The Illusion of Linear, Infinite Growth: Capitalism demands constant expansion. This narrative ignores ecological boundaries, viewing the destruction of the planet as a mere “externality” rather than a existential crisis.
- Hyper-Individualism & Transactional Relationships: Views employees and consumers as isolated economic actors rather than interconnected communities. Success is measured by individual accumulation rather than collective well-being.
- Quantity Over Quality: Success is reduced to metrics, margins, and quarterly profits. This devalues the emotional, spiritual, and physical health of workers, leading to burnout and exploitation. (Tricia Hersey calls rest resistance, and she means it literally, as a refusal to let capitalism set the terms of your body.)
- Fear of Open Conflict & Objectivity: White supremacy culture in business often demands “politeness” or toxic positivity to suppress legitimate critiques of systemic harm. It falsely claims that business decisions are purely “objective” and free from emotional or political bias.
How the Old Paradigm Pollutes Our Branding and Marketing
I learned to see this in marketing specifically from Ashanti Kunene and alisha morris. Their work on the colonial DNA of marketing is where this whole section comes from.
Marketing is where it does its loudest work. Most of what we’re taught as best practice runs on making someone feel not enough, then selling them the fix. Manufactured fear. Manufactured scarcity. Manufactured urgency.
- Agitation and Insecurity: Advertising frequently relies on patriarchal and white supremacist beauty/lifestyle standards to make people feel inadequate. It teaches consumers that they are “not enough” unless they purchase a product, tying human worth to material wealth.
- Performative Activism (Rainbow/Greenwashing): When social movements threaten the status quo, BAU co-opts the language of liberation. Brands use progressive imagery in marketing to protect their reputation while maintaining exploitative supply chains behind the scenes.
- The “Savior” Narrative: Marketing often frames corporations as benevolent entities solving societal problems, obscuring the fact that the corporate pursuit of profit created those very problems (e.g. a fossil fuel company advertising its minor investments in green energy).
Why the Old Paradigm is the Root of All Suffering
By prioritizing profit over people and the planet, the BAU paradigm directly causes:
- Climate Injustice: The consequences of global warming, such as extreme weather, crop failures, and displaced populations, disproportionately impact Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) communities in the Global South, who contributed the least to global emissions. The IPCC puts the number of people living in contexts highly vulnerable to climate change at 3.3 to 3.6 billion, around half of everyone alive (IPCC AR6, Working Group II, 2022).
- Ecocide: Forests, rivers and mountains are treated as inventory. Whole regions are written off as “sacrifice zones” so the extraction can continue somewhere convenient, a term the UN’s own Special Rapporteur on toxics and human rights now uses in official reports (UN Human Rights Council, 2022). The bitter irony is that the so-called green transition is repeating the pattern, with lithium and cobalt mining tearing through Indigenous land to build the batteries that are supposed to save us (Amnesty International on cobalt in the DRC, 2016 and ongoing).
- Poisoned Land, Water and Bodies: 99% of us are breathing air that exceeds the World Health Organisation’s own safety limits, and air pollution alone kills around 7 million people a year (WHO, 2022). Microplastics have now been found in human placenta (Ragusa et al., 2021) and in human blood (Leslie et al., 2022). The cost of production was never actually paid by the producer. It was quietly handed to whoever lives downstream.
- Mass Extinction: Around one million species are currently threatened with extinction, many within decades (IPBES Global Assessment, 2019). We are losing the more-than-human world at a speed with no precedent in human history, and the paradigm has no way of counting that as a loss, because a forest only appears on the balance sheet once it has been cut down.
- War, Occupation and Genocide: Almost every modern conflict traces back to land, resources, or the control of both, and there is an entire industry profiting from all of it. Global military spending hit $2.7 trillion in 2024, the sharpest rise in over thirty years (SIPRI, 2025). Where extraction meets armed force, the people who live on the land become an obstacle to be removed. We are watching this happen right now, in real time, on our phones.
- Forced Displacement and Modern Slavery: Over 122 million people are currently displaced from their homes (UNHCR, 2025). An estimated 27.6 million more are in forced labour (ILO, Walk Free and IOM, 2021), much of it woven into the supply chains of products sitting in our own houses. The cheapness of the thing you bought is somebody else’s life.
- Systemic Wealth Exploitation: Wealth is continuously funneled upward to a small group of predominantly white, male billionaires, while the global working class faces stagnating wages, unsafe working conditions, and eroding social safety nets. The world’s five richest men more than doubled their fortunes between 2020 and 2023. In the same period, nearly five billion people got poorer (Oxfam, “Inequality Inc.”, 2024).
- Cultural and Spiritual Erasure: A language dies roughly every two weeks, and around 40% of the world’s 7,000 languages are endangered (UNESCO). Indigenous knowledge systems were violently suppressed for centuries, and are now being sold back to us, stripped of their people and their context, as wellness products. Both halves of that sentence are the same paradigm at work.
- The Loneliness of the People Inside It: And the ones supposedly winning are anxious, medicated, disconnected from land, from community, from ritual, from meaning. The WHO now treats social isolation as a global health priority, and links it to a higher risk of early death comparable to smoking (WHO Commission on Social Connection, 2023). This is the part we tend to skip because it feels indulgent to mention next to the rest. But it’s the reason so many of us went looking for something else in the first place.
If you want to talk about your own business, or chat more about anything in this article that has sparked your curiosity, message me.
