Apple To Spend $100M On Racial Justice Initiative

Apple CEO Tim Cook announced the company has committed $100 million for a new initiative to help racial justice causes in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis, CNBC reported.

In a video posted Thursday (June 11), Cook said the new movement will focus on tackling education, economic equality and criminal justice in the black community. Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, will head up the new Apple Racial Equality and Justice initiative.

Cook said his own youth during the civil rights movement of the late 1960s spurred him to act now, too.

“Growing up in Alabama during the civil rights movement, I saw firsthand that the only thing that ever made lasting and durable change was people of goodwill putting aside comfort and safety to speak up to march to call for accountability and to do what they could to make a flawed society more perfect,” he said.

The Apple Racial Equality and Justice initiative will be working with historically black schools, colleges and universities, science and technology educators and outside groups like the Equal Justice Initiative, which works to oppose mass incarceration, CNBC reported.

Apple will also be working to up spending on black-owned suppliers, according to Cook, and will be working on hiring more black employees.

Cook said the company was “taking significant new steps on diversity and inclusion within Apple, because there is more we can and must do to hire, develop, and support those from underrepresented groups, especially our Black and brown colleagues.”

Apple is one among many companies working to address racial inequalities in the wake of the country-wide protests that made headlines in early June after Floyd’s murder. IBM has ceased selling facial recognition software, which has been criticized in the past for promoting racial discrimination. IBM said the tech had been misused by law enforcement.

In addition, PayPal has committed to spending $530 million to support minority-owned businesses, calling the racial divide in the U.S. “unacceptable.”