If You Care About Wellness, You Must Care About Equity
In 1851, Sojourner Truth stood in front of a crowd in Akron, Ohio, and asked the room a question they couldn’t answer honestly.
“Ain’t I a woman?”
It wasn’t just a rhetorical question. It was a confrontation—directed at the selective care and shallow empathy that left Black women out of a women’s movement supposedly built for them.
I can’t help but hear echoes of her voice in today’s workplace conversations around wellness.
We say we care about mental health.
We say we care about retention, well-being, and psychological safety.
We say we want sustainable, human-centered cultures.
But then we look away from the things that actually harm people most:
The bias embedded in hiring systems
The emotional labor of code-switching
The silence after a microaggression
The stress of being “the only”
The fear that asking for help could cost you credibility
Isn’t that a wellness issue too?
Ain’t they your employees too?
We’ve Been Treating the Symptoms, Not the Source
We act like people show up to work already burned out. But what if the workplace is producing the burnout?
We’ve invested in therapy stipends and wellness apps, offered flexible PTO and meditation resources. And still, people are leaving. Still, people are exhausted. Still, people feel unsafe.
That’s because mental health isn’t just about what’s happening outside of work. Often, it’s about what’s happening inside of it.
Workplaces don’t just witness distress. They cause it—especially for those from historically excluded groups.
When we treat mental health as something to manage reactively, we’re ignoring the fact that inequity itself is a public health crisis. This isn’t just a DEI issue. This is wellness.
Where We Went Wrong with DEI
As companies rebrand or abandon DEI under political pressure, I keep hearing the same thing:
“It’s not sustainable. We can’t keep spinning up new initiatives.”
And to that, I say—you’re right.
DEI should’ve never been an initiative in the first place.
It should’ve been embedded in the fabric of the company—from the start.
We went wrong when we made equity work something extra. Something “nice to have.” A program on the side of the business, instead of a value at the heart of it.
But if we truly care about employee wellness—if that’s the hill we’re choosing to stand on—then equity is not optional. It is the very foundation.
You can’t build a culture of care while tolerating harm.
How to Build Equity Into Wellness
This is the shift we need: not more DEI programs, but more equitable infrastructure built right into how we support people. That includes:
Eliminating bias in systems—especially performance reviews, hiring, and promotion
Understanding history and its connection to underrepresentation
Prioritizing representation as a wellness metric, not just a DEI goal
Designing benefits that address identity-specific stressors and lived experiences
Training leaders to reduce emotional labor—not just to talk about “allyship”
When equity is built into your wellness strategy, you're not just reacting to problems. You're preventing them.
That’s not “woke.” That’s wise.
And Still, Her Question Echoes
Sojourner Truth’s brilliance wasn’t just in naming a gap—it was in forcing the people in power to face their own contradiction.
She was saying:
“If you say you believe in women’s rights, but I’m not included in that belief, do you really believe it?”
Today, we must ask our own version of that question:
If you say you believe in wellness, but ignore the impact of bias and exclusion, do you really believe in wellness at all?
If you say you care about employee well-being, but won’t look at the systems that make employees sick—what do you actually care about?
And so I borrow her courage and her words, and ask leaders everywhere:
You say you care about your people. You say you care about their health, their peace, their possibility.
But you won’t examine your systems, your culture, your harm?
Ain’t they your employees too?
