The brutal death of George Floyd while in police custody sparked a huge global demonstration against racism
Jeff Bezos said he received “a number of disgusting but not surprising responses” after publicly supporting the Black Lives Matter movement.
The CEO of Amazon.com posted a screenshot of a secular, racist email he received from someone threatening to stop shopping at the retailer on Instagram on Sunday. support from Bezos to Black Lives Matter.
“This kind of hatred should not be hidden in the shadows,” wrote the richest person in the world. “It’s important to make it visible. This is just one example of the problem. And, Dave, you’re the kind of customer I’m happy to lose.”
Bezos joins other technical executives who speak out in response to the problems of racism and police brutality exposed by the murder of George Floyd. Reddit Inc. co-founder Alexis Ohanian resigned from the board and requested that he be replaced by a black candidate. Microsoft Corp CEO Satya Nadella has been using his Twitter feed for the past few days to highlight the claims of black employees of the software maker.
Social media CEOs, on the other hand, have criticized the way they have handled controversial posts on their platforms. Twitter Inc. CEO Jack Dorsey took the unusual step of slapping a rule violation notice on a tweet from President Donald Trump that the company glorified the violence, angering Trump supporters. In contrast, Facebook Inc. CEO Mark Zuckerberg continued to give Trump free rein, much to the chagrin of many of his own employees.
On Friday, Bezos posted an email exchange with another customer on Instagram in which he defended a decision to place a Black Lives Matter banner on Amazon.com touting a $ 10 million Amazon donation to a group racial and social justice organizations.
The recipients of the gifts, which include Black Lives Matter, the Brennan Center for Justice and the NAACP, were selected by Amazon management and the company’s black employee network, Amazon said. A blog article announcing the donations has been posted on bulletin boards at some Amazon warehouses, according to employees.
Much of Amazon’s racial diversity is found among front-line workers in its warehouses and other logistics depots, rather than white-collar software developers and product managers in corporate office buildings . Of the workers classified as workers or helpers in the detailed Amazon workforce data last disclosed in 2016, 58% of employees identified as non-white. This percentage dropped to 42% if we consider all other workers, a group mainly composed of professionals and managers.
Amazon and other tech companies have been criticized for years for their lack of racial and gender diversity in the leadership ranks. Amazon has resisted the efforts of outside shareholder groups asking it to set targets for greater inclusion. The company said that 26.5% of its U.S. workforce in late 2019 was identified as black or African American, a figure that drops to 8.3% when considering management alone.
Bezos, a laggard on social networks and a relatively infrequent user in terms of technological frameworks, has more than 2 million followers on Instagram.
(With the exception of the title, this story was not edited by GalacticGaming staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
