Brow Beat

The Daily Show Investigates a $100-a-Month Subscription Service for White People Who Want to Be Woke

What should white people do to combat racial injustice? How about pay $100 a month to learn how to be a better ally? On Tuesday, The Daily Show investigated one service that is capitalizing on white people’s desire to get woke: Safety Pin Box. The business’ co-founders, Marissa Jenae Johnson and Leslie Mac, explain that Safety Pin Box is “a monthly subscription box for white people who want to be allies in the fight for black liberation.” As TDS correspondent Roy Wood Jr. points out, it’s like Blue Apron, but for solving racism, and a substantial portion of the profits go to black, female activists.

Mac says that the service has nearly 1,000 subscribers, which made Wood curious about what kind of person would drop $100 a month to “feel bad about themselves.” To find out, he found a Safety Pin Box subscriber, Kat Livingston, and sent her undercover with an earpiece to approach random strangers to talk about racial justice. Most of the white people she approached didn’t seem too eager to talk about race, however—except for one who actually claimed she’d been a black slave in a past life. Yikes.

Wood then took a different, much more effective tack by instructing Livingston to apologize to black people for white nonsense. But when he went back to tell Johnson and Mac the great news that their box was effective, they weren’t especially interested. “That’s not how we measure our success,” said Mac. “Our success is measured in how much money we can give to black women.”

As for whether white people are actually using what they get in the box? “That’s between you and your white Jesus,” said Johnson.