Your Web News in One Place

Help Webnuz

Referal links:

Sign up for GreenGeeks web hosting
June 17, 2020 11:20 pm

Netflix CEO Reed Hastings Gives $120 Million To Historically Black Colleges

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, and his wife, Patty Quillin, donated $120 million to the United Negro College Fund, Spelman College and Morehouse College, the largest-ever individual gift to support scholarships at historically black colleges and universities. The record donation comes amid protests after the police killing ofGeorge Floyd, and the national conversation about how to end systemic racism. That conversation has included discussions about how to provide more education and job opportunities for African Americans. Unlike the Ivy League universities that have endowments in the tens of billions of dollars -- Harvard University's endowment tops $40 billion -- the top historically black colleges and universities, or H.B.C.U.s, have endowments that are hundreds of millions of dollars. Spelman's, for example, is around $390 million. Mr. Hastings said he and Ms. Quillin wanted to help change that. They have made education a primary focus of their philanthropy, and have given smaller amounts in the past several years to the same institutions. "I think white people in our nation need to accept that it's a collective responsibility," Mr. Hastings said. Mr. Floyd's killing and the emotional outpouring that followed were "the straw that broke the camel's back, I think, for the size of the donation," he added. Mr. Hastings said he hoped that the donation would lead other wealthy individuals to give to H.B.C.U.s. "Generally, white capital flows to predominantly white institutions, perpetuating capital isolation," he and Ms. Quillin said in a statement announcing the donation on Wednesday. The report adds that 7 percent of Netflix's employees in the United States are African-American, "as are 8 percent of its company leaders, which is among the highest in the technology industry (but still only about half the share of African-Americans in the overall population)."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.


Original Link: http://rss.slashdot.org/~r/Slashdot/slashdot/~3/kbLHbbjosRQ/netflix-ceo-reed-hastings-gives-120-million-to-historically-black-colleges

Share this article:    Share on Facebook
View Full Article

Slashdot

Slashdot was originally created in September of 1997 by Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda. Today it is owned by Geeknet, Inc..

More About this Source Visit Slashdot