In a recent article in Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook boasted about his company’s social justice initiative amid the coronavirus pandemic.
In a recent opinion article published in Wall Street Journal, Apple CEO Tim Cook reflects on last year and the effect of the coronavirus pandemic, which he says was a year in which “critical conversations about equity and systemic injustice reached a new urgency and a deserved central role in our conversation. national.”
Cook goes on to discuss how the virus has affected the world and how “structural discrimination” has resulted in some people being affected more negatively than others. Cook writes:
In simple theory, a disease should affect all of us equally. But in fact, the opposite is true. We have all seen, in real time, how structural discrimination and obstacles to opportunities work in a crisis. In our communities, all the burdens – from infection rates and care outcomes, to economic adversity and the challenges of virtual learning when schools are closed – fall most heavily on those for whom true equity has always been the furthest from being achieved. . As someone who grew up during the civil rights movement, it has been frustrating to see how much work remains to be done, but encouraging to see the degree to which people of goodwill have abandoned comfort with the status quo to march and demand something better.
Cook said Apple’s approach in times of crisis is to ask “how can we help?” which has resulted in investments in social justice and racial equality initiatives. Cook states:
This has led us to make important new investments through our Racial Equity and Justice Initiative. These projects include the Propel Center in Atlanta, which we are helping to build in partnership with the country’s historically black colleges and universities, to support the next generation of color leaders in areas ranging from machine learning to application development, from entrepreneurship to design; and our first Apple Developer Academy in the United States, in downtown Detroit, home to more than 50,000 black-owned companies and there is no shortage of great ideas for the app economy.
Despite Cook’s dedication to social justice and racial equality, it appears that this dedication does not extend beyond America. It was reported last year that iPhone makers in China were using forced labor by Uighur Muslims held in Chinese concentration camps. Breitbart News reported at the time:
The Tech Transparency Project (TTP) is a nonprofit surveillance group that has contested claims by Western technology companies like Apple that their supply chains are completely free from forced labor. On Tuesday, TTP showed documents to the Washington Post which demonstrated that thousands of Uighurs were sent to work for Lens Technology, one of the oldest suppliers to Apple, Inc.
Apple consistently claims to have a “zero tolerance for forced labor” and conducts vigorous analysis to ensure that no Uighur labor is used in its products, and repeated this denial in response to Washington Post report, but TTP said its documents prove that there are, in fact, thousands of Uighurs working in Lens Technology’s factories.
“Our research shows that Apple’s use of forced labor in its supply chain goes far beyond what the company recognized,” said TTP director Katie Paul to the Washington Post.
“Apple claims to take extraordinary steps to monitor its supply chain for such problems, but the evidence we found was openly available on the Internet,” she added.
Read more at Breitbart News here, and read Cook’s full op-ed at Washington Post on here.
Lucas Nolan is a Breitbart News reporter who covers issues of free speech and online censorship. Follow him on Twitter @LucasNolan or contact us by secure email at [email protected]