Uber stands with the Black community

by philg

Judging by the contents of my inbox, America is truly the land of goodwill and brotherhood. A typical recent example has a subject line of “Uber stands with the Black community”:

I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short. I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths. I wish that all members of our Black community felt safe enough to move around their cities without fear. I wish that I didn’t have to try to find the words to explain all of this to my two young sons.

But I’ve been given hope this week by hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors demanding change. I am committed to being part of that change.

We know this isn’t enough. It won’t be enough until we see true racial justice. But we plan to work day in and day out to improve, learn, and grow as a company.

Dara Khosrowshahi
CEO

(From the fact that riots and looting give him hope, I think it is safe to infer that he’s explaining everything to his two young sons while safely enroute in the family Gulfstream from fenced airport to fenced airport.)

The Uber Diversity and Inclusion Report for 2019 shows that standing with the Black community can be done by “tech leaders” who are 51 percent white and 47.5 percent Asian (“Black of African American” people hold 0.8 percent of these jobs; “Hispanic or Latinx” are also at 0.8 percent).

Readers: What would Travis Kalanick have written about recent events?

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8 thoughts on “Uber stands with the Black community”

  1. Your comment

    >From the fact that riots and looting give him hope

    Is that indeed a fact?

  2. His actual statement

    “I’ve been given hope this week by hundreds of thousands of peaceful protestors”

    Peaceful

    • You have it there exactly, Steve. The words are clearly quoted and then something else entirely is assumed. It makes one wonder what’s going on here? What’s the point?

    • Are the black bloc rioters who always turn up with the peaceful protesters part of Dara’s Hope or not? It appears they are not explicitly excluded. We need a clarification.

  3. Uber Eats is supplying free delivery to black owned businesses in the U.S. and Canada for the rest of the year. That’s their prerogative, but what do Hispanics have to do to get free delivery now? They’re even less represented among Uber’s workforce than Blacks. What if the restaurant owner is white but they’re married to a black person, does that count? I wonder why Asians don’t seem to get shot much at all? They must be working and studying hard and playing the piano all the time. It’s tough to get shot when you’re playing the piano, unless you’re in a really bad saloon.

    https://www.thestreet.com/investing/uber-eats-app-enables-free-delivery-from-black-owned-restaurants

    And the diversity numbers in the story differ from yours:
    ” In 2019, some 45% of Uber’s U.S. employees were white, 33% Asian, 9% black and 8% Hispanic, a company report showed.”

    • That does seem like an odd policy. What if a restaurant is owned by partners, one of whom is African American and one of whom is Latinx? Does Uber Eats charge them 100% of the regular commission because they aren’t 100% black-owned? 50%? 0%?

    • Free Everything: If the diversity numbers are different, it is because I took the numbers from “tech leadership” rather than the whole company, which presumably has a lot of crummy low-wage jobs, e.g., in customer service.

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