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Apple Launches $100 Million Racial Justice Initiative; YouTube Creates $100 Million Fund for Black Creators and Artists (variety.com) 229

Apple CEO Tim Cook on Thursday announced a $100 million project focused on the systemic barriers to opportunity and dignity faced by the black community, with special emphasis on education, economic equality and criminal justice reform. Details: The effort will begin in the U.S., then expand internationally over time.
It will be led by Lisa Jackson, the former EPA administrator who has led Apple's environmental efforts for the last several years.
Apple is also addressing internal issues, promising to boost its hiring of underrepresented minorities and increase its spending with black-owned suppliers.
YouTube announced a multiyear, $100 million fund dedicated to "amplifying and developing the voices of Black creators and artists and their stories," according to CEO Susan Wojcicki. From a report: "At YouTube, we believe Black lives matter and we all need to do more to dismantle systemic racism," Wojcicki wrote in a blog post. "We're committed to doing better as a platform to center and amplify Black voices and perspectives." As an example of content being funded under the new initiative, Wojcicki announced that this Saturday, June 13, YouTube will host livestream fundraising event produced by YouTube Originals, called "Bear Witness, Take Action."
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Apple Launches $100 Million Racial Justice Initiative; YouTube Creates $100 Million Fund for Black Creators and Artists

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  • Yay equality! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Train0987 ( 1059246 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @01:48PM (#60171792)

    Nothing says equality more than special privileges based on skin color!

    • Re:Yay EQUITY! (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      It's called equity.
    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by yabos ( 719499 )
      Do black people somehow have a harder time than other non-white people? Seems quite strange to specify money just for black people.
    • Re:Yay equality! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by hey! ( 33014 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @02:06PM (#60171852) Homepage Journal

      Sure, because no other people in this society have special privileges.

  • by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @02:09PM (#60171870) Homepage

    ...how the skin colour of Indians doesnt stop them getting the top jobs? Nor do they bleat about white privilege or oppression despite that being what the British empire did to them, Perhaps unlike certain other communities they get off their backsides and work hard and dont blame their problems on everyone except themselves. Ditto the chinese.

    • by bobby ( 109046 )

      I'm no sociologist, but I think India is a very different thing. Indians have a caste system. They inherently accept inequality as the norm. Fighting it would have been futile over the centuries- those in power certainly weren't going to give up power. The lower-classes had no method nor hope of joining together and fighting it (as they still don't).

      As much as people like to rail against the British empire, and as bad as many things probably were (I only know a very little), the lower classes took advan

      • Also because they have the highest median income?

        https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

        By ancestry
        Indian American (2016) : $132,746 [1]
        Australian American (2016) : $90,930[2]
        South African American (2017) : $90,517[2]
        Taiwanese American (2016) : $90,221[1]

        • by bobby ( 109046 )

          Wow, that's all very interesting. I never looked at that before. Well, a lot of them are doctors, bio-tech researchers, engineers, IT developers and admins.

    • by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @02:53PM (#60172016)
      The skin color of black people doesn't stop them from getting jobs either. I'd suggest reading this article [quillette.com] by Coleman Hughes who presents good arguments against systematic oppression as a whole, but specifically examines that idea that society could discriminate solely against blacks by comparing black immigrant populations from African or Caribbean countries against American blacks. The immigrant populations earn significantly more (and for some groups higher than the national average) and make up the majority of black students at elite colleges despite only being a minority of the total black population.

      If systematic oppression were real, surely we should expect to see both of American blacks and immigrant blacks suffer equally from it, but that's not the case. The author of the article does bring up an argument of culture as being partially responsible (as well as the difficulty of pinning down what that's supposed to mean or how to measure it), but one of the most obvious explanations for the difference is the staggering number of black children being raised by single mothers as opposed to the immigrant populations which are almost always two parent families. If you do any kind of analysis on criminality, that factor is one of the largest and if you control for that factor alone it explains over a third of the supposed gap between black and white crime that people like to parrot so often.

      Worse yet, you have groups that position themselves as trying to help solve these imagined problems that are only exacerbating them. Here's something from the What We Believe page of one such group [blacklivesmatter.com]:

      We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

      How can anyone support that? It's the exact opposite of what should be done. It's maddening. It's so irresponsible and misguided that you'd almost think it were intentional. It's like a group that wants to end global warming describing how they're going to accomplish it by increasing the amount of carbon that they release in the air.

      • We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

        When I was growing up (two score years ago), that's how it was to a large extent; if a child was misbehaving it was assumed ANY parent could scold the child, and the parent would sheepishly take the child away and DAMN was a penalty paid for embarrassing the parent in public!

        Try that today, and you'll get a thousand angry voices calling for your scalp for daring to suggest that a parent is failing because their child was acting out, and you told the kid to quiet down or stop acting out...

        Apparently the vil

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @04:54PM (#60172670) Homepage Journal

        Some people seem to think that immigrants are all poor, no education, desperate, pull themselves up from their bootstraps types.

        In reality many are highly educated and skilled, young and motivated. So naturally when they arrive they do better than many of those already there.

    • It was as recently as 75 years ago a group of people were imprisoned, many for more than two years, with their ethnicity being the sole justification. The Japanese people have become very successful in the United States since that time. More successful than white people by several measures.

      Shifting to a tangent just to throw fuel on the fire... I will note that the order to evict these people and detain them was signed by FDR. Yes, the FDR of "The New Deal" fame. The same FDR that on multiple occasions expr

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
  • Let's be real (Score:5, Insightful)

    by alvinrod ( 889928 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @02:10PM (#60171874)
    Let's be real for a minute. What are the odds that any of this money actually makes it into the hands of someone who's poor and still living rough and might actually benefit from the help as opposed to someone who went to college and comes from a solid middle class background? I have a feeling YouTube is just going to end up handing out money to grievance studies majors who like to whine about imagined oppression as opposed to those who actually face poverty on a regular basis. Apple looks like they're just going to end up buying more from suppliers owned by a black person, who for that reason is already more wealthy than the average person regardless of race.

    If either of these companies gave a damn about trying to fix any of these problems they're going about it in the wrong way. The best thing either could do to help break the cycle of poverty that so many black people face on a generational basis would be to hire employees who don't have a college degree, or even who may not have finished high school. Maybe that seems overly simplistic, but it really is a huge deal because any job experience makes it easier to get another job and people actually build and develop skillsets while they work which are often just as or more valuable than any degree.
    • Re:Let's be real (Score:4, Insightful)

      by sabri ( 584428 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @02:12PM (#60171878)

      What are the odds that any of this money actually makes it into the hands of someone who's poor

      0

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Train0987 ( 1059246 )

      The same odds that any of the people donating to Black Lives Matter know that ALL of the money goes directly to ActBlue, a PAC dedicated to Democrat political candidates.

      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        This is untrue. It seems to originate from Reddit and was repeated by such reputable publications as Sputnik News.

        • Liar.

          Go here: https://blacklivesmatter.com/ [blacklivesmatter.com]
          Click the Donate button and it takes you here: https://secure.actblue.com/don... [actblue.com]

          In the fine print at the bottom of BLM's donation page it said very clearly that donations are collected by ActBlue. It's curiously not there today once it was reported - not on Reddit, although the CEO gave an evasive answer in an AMA about where the money is going. ActBlue's TOS says very clearly that they chose where to spend the money they raise and it may not go to the cause sp

    • by k6mfw ( 1182893 )

      Let's be real for a minute. What are the odds that any of this money actually makes it into the hands of someone who's poor and still living rough and might actually benefit from the help...

      Good point. Reminds me the article other day about growing "tent cities" around Cupertino, a very wealthy tech hub but ever increasing number of homeless. It seems root problem is the business model of Silicon Valley.

    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      That's certainly what Intel did when they put $300 million in a few years ago. Much of it went in to improving hiring and developing training and gateway programmes.

  • It really seems like this time was different. Good.

  • They're attempting to placate the revolutionaries with cash. They're going to be shocked when the crocodile eats them anyway.

  • Man I wish I was black
  • What exactly is this money for that YouTube is putting up? Pretty much *anyone* has the ability to record and edit high quality videos in this day and age. In the US you can already get cell phones and service for FREE if you are disadvantaged (that applies to anyone who qualifies based on financial situation, and isn't a racist program). So I'm just curious what the YouTube money is for exactly. I'm also curious if there is actually some misrepresentation of the black population in YouTube, or if the av

    • They are trying to be relevant and have a pile of cash sitting there in case anyone questions how little they have done.
      Guilt and feelings of being irrelevant makes people do funny things.

  • ...but if you agree that we need "corrective" racism to counteract centuries of anti-black racism, what's your endpoint that "ok we're equal enough that it can stop now"?

    I mean, for example there are all sorts of programs to encourage / help women into higher education, and now that the majority of college students are female, shouldn't we be shutting those things down?

  • by SuperDre ( 982372 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @03:32PM (#60172210) Homepage
    If that isn't racism, I don't know.. Even 'positive' racisim/discrimination is still racism/discimination...
    • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

      If you feel this angry about charities helping people other than you, imagine you would feel about a lifetime facing systemic and overt racism.

    • If that isn't racism, I don't know.. Even 'positive' racisim/discrimination is still racism/discimination...

      Yes but if everyone is racist against a different group then the entire world levels out. If you want to stop "positive discrimination" then I suggest you tear down the structure that brought about negative discrimination in the first place rather than whining that someone is daring to attempt to level the playing field.

  • Want to help? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by LynnwoodRooster ( 966895 ) on Thursday June 11, 2020 @03:49PM (#60172302) Journal
    Then do whatever you can to stop black families from breaking apart. Economically and educationally, asians out-perform whites, who out-perform hispanics, who out-perform blacks. And if you look at the family structure, asians have the fewest single-parent households, followed by whites, then hispanics - then blacks. There is a VERY strong correlation, and it's widely accepted, that criminal behavior is impacted and tied to growing up in a single parent household. Likewise a tie between scholastic success and two-parent households. So fix that - and the rest takes care of itself.
  • As Long as they Speak English. Otherwise, no one gives a shit, apparently.

  • People who are stuck in poverty tend to stay (or return to it) there no matter what is done.
    Itâ(TM)s quite depressing...

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