![]() ![]() That said, the Safety Pin Box is a very interesting glimpse at a certain strain of woke white slacktivism. Plus, there are worse things in the world than the voluntary donation of money from wealthy white liberals to presumably less wealthy black small-business entrepreneurs and activists. So this shouldn’t be slotted into any sort of overheated “activist liberalism run amok” storyline. It’s important to keep all this in perspective: The Box has only a few hundred subscribers (it would be fun to do a pool estimating how many of them are white Brooklyn liberals), Johnson and Mac are donating some of the proceeds to black female activists, and liberals and lefties themselves have been highly critical of the exercise. ![]() “That’s probably unrealistic.” Related Stories “I’d like to think - ‘Wow, I will be so incredibly sensitized,’” she replies. McMorris-Santoro asks her how she’s hoping she’ll feel after she’s received all 12 boxes from her yearlong subscription. “It embarrasses me, honestly, that I just don’t have a world where I encounter, naturally, people of color,” she explains. She also offers some revealing details about why she subscribed. Among other things, the box contains a request that Ellman give higher tips to black people and explains that the month’s theme is combating white supremacy through “radical compassion.” Some of the other content is about media habits - “This week, I take a look at the media I consume on a regular basis and evaluate it for bias and worthiness,” Ellman reads aloud from one of the included slips of paper. In the second half, McMorris-Santoro sits with Safety Pin Box subscriber Barat Ellman, a Park Slope rabbi and Jewish studies professor, as she opens her first delivery. “So we’re looking to move that into action.” That is, into more substantive forms of education and activism. They say they’re hoping to move beyond the mostly toothless symbolism of post-election safety-pin-wearing. In the first half of the short segment, McMorris-Santoro meets with the founders as they pack up the first batch of boxes. Every month, they send their subscribers the Safety Pin Box, which Vice reporter Evan McMorris-Santoro describes as being “designed to wake up white people to the realities of being black in America.” That’s the business plan set up by Grand Rapids, Michigan entrepreneurs Marissa Johnson and Leslie Mac, at least. One answer, according to a recent Vice News Tonight segment: Spend between $25 and $100 a month to receive a box that helps you be a better ally. ![]() What can the conscientious white ally do? With Donald Trump elected on the basis of one of the race-baitiest presidential campaigns in modern American history, Republicans firmly in power, and mounting evidence that progress toward racial equality has been stalled out for years if not decades, it feels like there’s little chance of substantive progress anytime soon. It’s a fairly paralyzing time to be a guilty white American liberal. ![]()
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