I have a friend who started an “ethical and fair trade” clothing line that was just picked up by a big American retailer. The clothes are made in India by local workers and sold in the United States. The production seems fine, but what concerns me is that my friend (who is white) uses brown emoji hands when she markets the clothes on social media. The clothing itself — the cuts and prints — already seems appropriated. But her blatant use of dark-skinned emoji makes me uncomfortable. What should I say?

ANONYMOUS

Not a syllable! You have too deeply discounted the value of your friend’s fair-trade enterprise and over-magnified your relatively trifling concerns. Your friend may be offering life-changing wages to people in a poorer region. (With expansion, she could help even more of them.) Better still, ethical supply chains eliminate child labor and other exploitation in fabric making, pattern cutting, sewing, packing and distribution.

Given that all this work transpires in India — that the clothing is indeed made by Indians — her use of brown-skinned emoji hands seems reasonable enough. And if I total up your major complaints: fabrics and designs that seem “appropriated” (from the very region where they are made — huh?) and the dreaded brown-skinned emoji, you seem to be missing the forest for the trees.

It is exquisitely easy to stand on the sidelines and nitpick at the imperfections of worthy projects. (As a jealous person, I am often likely to pile on.) But rather than quibbling with your pal over symbolic concerns, why not congratulate her on the material good she’s doing? If you can’t, better to keep quiet.