Our $100/month subscription is a premium box and you get three full tasks, access to our biweekly podcast, and quarterly webinars with high-profile black women. The $50/month subscription box is more like a pen-pal partnership between two white people that collaborate on tasks for the month together. The $25/month subscription box is an electronic form of solidarity, with one emailed task per month and exclusive calls to action. We wanted to come up with different options for different levels of engagement. And we can literally tell them what to do even though we’ve already been telling them, and they haven’t been listening.Įxplain how Safety Pin Box works. And that’s what brought us to say, if people want to actually do something useful, they can pay us reparations. Halfway through our trip, when we started to see the bumper stickers and necklaces on Etsy, we had a conversation about how the commercialization is not only problematic in its own right, but that all of these things are most likely just going to privileged white people. Leslie and I both separately kind of laughed at it because after everything, the Black Lives Matter movement, immigration, the Dakota Access pipeline, that the response was wearing a safety pin?! We just sort of laughed it off as a very clear display that folks did not know how or did not want to actually show up in ways that mattered. The whole safety pin thing started happening right as we were going on vacation to Jamaica, right after the election. When you first noticed the safety pin trend, what did you think? And why did you decide to take action in this very specific way? The Cut spoke with Johnson about the success of their company, what they’ve observed about allyship since the election, and what reparations for people of color can mean in 2017. Both Johnson and Mac have quit their jobs to focus on the project full time. Three months later, Safety Pin Box has 800 subscribers and has contributed nearly $21,000 to Black Women Being. Plus, their cash contributions fund black-women activists, in an attempt at reparations. The monthly subscription service challenges its users to do more with their outrage than display it, and in exchange for $50–$100 a month (depending on the program) receive not a pin, not a pussy hat, but a lesson about racial bias and a task to tackle it. ![]() Marissa Jenae Johnson and Leslie Mac created Safety Pin Box to find out. If white people really wanted to be allies, they wondered, would they be willing to do more than pin a piece of metal to their shirts? And if so, what would that look like? But amidst the corporations trying to figure out how to capitalize on white Americans’ desire to broadcast their solidarity in the Trump era, one company is doing something different: Safety Pin Box is the brainchild of two women of color who were frustrated with the superficial display of white activism. Since the safety pin trend launched after the election, a lot of people have tried to profit from it - from Etsy artisans to luxury brands.
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