Google Just Dropped $11,000,000 to Make Sure #BlackLivesMatter

Of course, the company didn’t phrase it that way because it would have to spend another $11 million cleaning up all the mess from the white people’s heads that exploded.

But according to USA Today, Google just pledged $11.5 million in grants and funding to help organizations fight racial bias. Specifically, Google’s philanthropic division wants the money to go toward efforts to use data, information and analytics to uncover racial disparities in policing and the criminal-justice system. The grants will go to organizations focused on ending mass incarceration, keeping youths of color out of the school-to-prison pipeline and reforming the criminal-justice system, including:

$1 million to the Equal Justice Initiative, a nonprofit focused on confronting past injustices, including America’s history of lynchings and unequal treatment of people of color;
$5 million to the Center for Policing Equity to build a national database that tracks police departments’ use of force and traffic stops;
$1 million to Impact Justice, an organization that focuses on keeping juveniles out of the criminal-justice system; and
$1.5 million to Measures for Justice to build a web system to show how local municipalities treat people based on gender, color, age, etc.

Although publications like The Root regularly trumpet statistics and research that highlight the inequities in policing and the criminal-justice system, Google hopes that more information can produce data-driven solutions to combat the problems of race in the American justice system. Justin Steele, principal of Google.org, explained: “There is significant ambiguity regarding the extent of racial bias in policing and criminal sentencing. We must find ways to improve the accessibility and usefulness of information.”

Although Google did not specifically mention #BlackLivesMatter, there is little doubt that the recent outcry against state violence and injustice influenced Google’s philanthropic initiatives. Feel free to direct people to this story whenever they ask what good things protesting has produced. Tell them this is the reason social action and unity are important.

Plus, when wypipo find out, we’re gonna need all the help we can get mopping up the white tears.