An antiracist theory of cleaning. In Making the World Clean: Wasted Lives Wasted Environment
and Racial Capitalism Françoise Vergès examines the racial and gendered politics of wasting
lands bodies and resources and the organized deprivation of clean water shelter and access
to health services—in other words the structural denial along racial lines of vital needs.
Through 38 short sections she looks at the social relations that have made cleaning into
drudgery and into a racialized gendered poorly paid job that is nevertheless necessary for
any society to function. She concludes with the proposition of a feminist decolonial
antiracist anti-patriarchal and anti-capitalist politics of cleaning. Or simply put of
“decolonial cleaning.” To Vergès the structural denial of the elemental needs of women of
color (sanitary pads access to water and privacy for basic washing) and why these needs are
considered insignificant and trivial shows how racism and class war are gendered. By examining
the banal the trivial and the elemental the author addresses cleaning as a necessity
rather than the maintenance of a consumerist lifestyle a condition of basic care of the body
and the mind that is considered with indifference by racial capitalism white environmentalism
and even too often by humanitarian organizations. She argues that by building “life-affirming
institutions ” as Ruth Wilson Gilmore advocates struggles against the whitening of cleaning
create sites of freedom. “Decolonial cleaning” imagines cleaning as taking care of land humans
plants animals and rivers not seeking to discipline them or transform them into commodities
or objects of conservation but cleaning as a practice dedicated to sustaining the living world.
