Equity Matters Podcast

Equity Matters Podcast Equity Matters Media is a storytelling and public health media platform centered on equity, and narrative justice.

We explore the systems behind what we see and the stories too often left out.

We have a tendency to tell movements through their most recognizable names.But movements don't move because of one perso...
08/27/2026

We have a tendency to tell movements through their most recognizable names.

But movements don't move because of one person. They move because people bring different gifts to the work. Someone organizes. Someone writes. Someone teaches. Someone builds relationships. Someone feeds people. Someone communicates the message. Someone keeps showing up when nobody is watching.

The face may become history. But the movement was always collective.
That's part of what I want to remember this Black August: you don't have to be the most visible person in the room to make a meaningful contribution.

What's your gift to the movement?

08/26/2026

What if the most unsettling person in the room isn't the person who hates you?
What if it's the person who genuinely believes they're helping you?

That's what makes the Dalton family in Native Son so interesting. It’s an uncomfortable lesson in you don't have to hate people to benefit from inequality. And good intentions don't automatically produce just outcomes.

When we talk about disaster preparedness and community resilience, we often focus on the response: How quickly can we re...
08/25/2026

When we talk about disaster preparedness and community resilience, we often focus on the response: How quickly can we restore power? How quickly can we get resources where they are needed? But the question we should ask instead is: Who is most vulnerable when systems fail and who has the fewest resources to recover?

Residents in Gary, Indiana, are still dealing with the effects of severe storms that left communities without power. For some households, an outage is an inconvenience. For others, it can mean spoiled food, unsafe temperatures, disrupted employment, medication concerns, and increased health and safety risks. That difference matters.

Friendly reminder - infrastructure is an equity issue. Where you live, your income, your age, your health, your access to transportation, and your ability to absorb an unexpected expense can all shape what a disaster looks like for you and how quickly you can recover. This is why public health cannot treat infrastructure as someone else's issue.

Resilience is more than getting the lights back on. It's about making sure communities aren't left in the dark in the first place and aren't left waiting longer when systems fail.

Gary is more than the people we remember from its past. (Insert Michael Jackson song here). It is a community of people who deserve our attention right now.
That's the work of equity: not just responding to crisis, but asking why the burden of crisis is so often distributed unequally.

We often talk about silencing as though it means someone was prevented from speaking.But sometimes, silencing works diff...
08/25/2026

We often talk about silencing as though it means someone was prevented from speaking.
But sometimes, silencing works differently. It makes speaking costly.

Throughout Black history, people who challenged injustice were not simply met with disagreement. They were surveilled, criminalized, discredited, imprisoned, and sometimes killed. The focus shifted from what they were saying to whether they were dangerous for saying it.

And that matters because a story doesn't have to be completely erased to be silenced.

Faces at the Farmer’s Market at the Capitol today in Downtown Lansing. Rare to have my camera on a work day but glad I d...
08/25/2026

Faces at the Farmer’s Market at the Capitol today in Downtown Lansing. Rare to have my camera on a work day but glad I did!

Native Son is a story about what happens when a society built on racial segregation, fear, and inequality leaves Black p...
08/24/2026

Native Son is a story about what happens when a society built on racial segregation, fear, and inequality leaves Black people with few places to put their anger. Richard Wright’s 1940 novel was written in a country where racial apartheid wasn’t metaphorical, it was embedded in law, housing, education, employment, and everyday life. Bigger’s choices don’t exist in a vacuum. Wright asks readers to look beyond individual behavior and examine the systems and conditions shaping Bigger’s life. And perhaps most uncomfortably, the novel gives language and narrative space to anger produced by oppression. It doesn't ask us to make that anger comfortable.
Books like Native Son remind us that silencing Black stories doesn’t make the realities they describe disappear.

That’s why I’m continuing my Stop Silencing Black Stories campaign and why my latest podcast episode digs deeper into what happens when we decide certain Black stories are simply too difficult to tell. Links in the bio to learn more.

What do you think makes a book dangerous: what it says, or what it forces us to confront?
🎙️ Listen to the latest episode.
📚 And keep reading the stories they told us to avoid.

08/23/2026

One of the reasons The Five Heartbeats has stayed with me is that it gives us something many institutions struggle to do: it lets us see a system through the people living inside it. We often talk about exploitation in abstract terms like contracts, ownership, power, and money. But thee stories make those structures human.

That’s why Black storytelling matters to me. Because our stories preserve ways of seeing that can disappear when we stop telling them.

Now, Michael Wright's Eddie King Jr. was complicated, brilliant, flawed, and deeply human. Maybe that's why the character and the film stayed with so many of us.

RIP Michael Wright.

When I was younger, I thought August was a weird month. No major holidays. No fireworks. No big celebrations. Just back-...
08/19/2026

When I was younger, I thought August was a weird month. No major holidays. No fireworks. No big celebrations. Just back-to-school and my birthday. But getting older has changed the way I look at August. I've started paying attention to what happened in this month and how often August shows up in the history of Black resistance.

We had rebellions, organizing, marches, political struggles, and sacrifices. Black people demanding to be free in ways that weren't always comfortable, convenient, or celebrated.

So today, on my birthday, I'm paying attention. And I'm grateful for another year to keep learning.

We don’t always list studying at the top of the list when we discuss acts of resistance. But it can be. When you underst...
08/14/2026

We don’t always list studying at the top of the list when we discuss acts of resistance. But it can be. When you understand the history behind a system, it's harder to accept that system as inevitable.

And when you study the people who challenge power, you start to see resistance differently. It isn’t some spontaneous anger. It’s something that can be intentional and deeply informed.

So I pulled together a few books that can help us think more deeply about Black resistance, incarceration, power, and liberation.

What are you reading right now that is challenging the way you think?

Resistance has always had a cost. Sometimes the cost is your comfort. It could be your freedom. It might be your safety....
08/13/2026

Resistance has always had a cost.

Sometimes the cost is your comfort. It could be your freedom. It might be your safety. And sometimes the cost, is your life.

When we talk about Black resistance, it can be easy to turn people into names and photographs. But behind each of those names was a person who made a choice to challenge something they believed was unjust. (I aspire)

That doesn’t mean we have to romanticize every decision or agree with every tactic. But it does mean we should be honest about what resistance has required from Black people throughout history.

This Black August, I want to remember the people who paid a price for resisting.

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