By ONME Newswire
Watch part 2 of the COVID-19 ONME News Review, "Education Crisis in California: The Racial Inequity Gap as the community and experts review the national COVID-19 crisis affecting families, all schools, all districts
The panel of experts tackled the growing issue at July 31 Ethnic Media Services news conference. Communities have to turn inward and find the resources kids need to thrive.
With over 11 million students around the nation lacking lap tops, and many regions still reliant on antiquated DSL technology, panelists singled out the role of tech giants.
“Jeff Bezos (founder and chief of Amazon) is raking in incredible profits for his business” during the pandemic, as is Facebook, Google and Apple, noted Pedro Noguera, Dean of the Rossier School of Education at the University of Southern California (USC).
“They have a moral responsibility to bridge the digital divide but they don’t act. They should be held accountable by Congress to invest in access to the Internet. It is a basic right at this point in our history,” Noguera said.
Amazon announced its Q2 revenues on July 30. Despite the pandemic, the company doubled its net revenue from $2.6 billion for Q2 in 2019 to $5.2 billion in net revenue for the months of April, May, and June. Sales increased 40 percent to $88.9 billion in the second quarter, compared with $63.4 billion in second quarter 2019, said the company in a public statement.
Apple announced gross revenues of almost $58 billion, with $11 million in revenue.
In June, following the killings by law enforcement officers of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, corporations pledged to spend billions of dollars on addressing structural racism and inequities, noted Dr. Shaun Harper, Executive Director of USC’s Race and Equity Center.
“Many of those tech companies made those announcements about the money that they were putting up without fully even knowing how they were going to spend those dollars,” Harper said.
Watch part 3 below:
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