Giving Back

At Remade By Hand, I donate a portion of my sales to organizations fighting for racial equity, including Fair Fight, SisterSong, the National Birth Equity Collaborative, the Okra Project, Black Women’s Health Imperative, Black Girls Code, the Ohio Justice & Policy Center, Color of Change, We Need Diverse Books, Embracing Equity, and the Conscious Kid.

Equity boils down to a question of fairness: not just "does the system work well?" but "for whom does the system work well?" The answer is almost never "everyone."

In his book How to Be an Antiracist, Ibram X. Kendi writes, "Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing." Laws, rules, guidelines, best practices—in a word, policies—can be racist (causing or perpetuating racial inequity) or antiracist (causing or perpetuating racial equity). "There is no such thing as a non racist or race-neutral policy."

These policies underly the vast gaps between racial groups in America—gaps that exist from health to education, wealth and opportunity to physical safety. To address them, we must focus on equity before we emphasize equality. We cannot all begin at the same starting line until the systemic barriers to all groups have been remedied.