What you need to know
- Apple CEO Tim Cook has written an editorial for The Wall Street Journal.
- Cook said that there was an urgent need for healing and education in the post-pandemic world.
Tim Cook has called for "a durable and hopeful future for all" in a new editorial for The Wall Street Journal.
In the piece, Cook writes:
This year has forced each of us to re-examine and to change how we live, work and relate to one another. And for that reason I don't think it's a coincidence that the year of Covid-19 was also the year where critical conversations about equity and systemic injustice attained both new urgency and a well-deserved central role in our national conversation.
Cook says that while "simple theory" suggests a disease should treat us all equally "in plain fact, the opposite is true":
We have all seen, in real time, how structural discrimination and obstacles to opportunity do their work in a crisis. In our communities, every burden—from rates of infection and care outcomes, to economic adversity, to the challenges of virtual learning when schools are closed—falls heaviest on those for whom true equity has always been farthest from reach. As someone who grew up during the civil-rights movement, it has been frustrating to see how much work is still to be done but heartening to see the degree to which people of good will have set aside comfort with the status quo to march and to demand something better.
Cook said that "we can't simply assume" that healing would follow the pandemic, and that all of us have a responsibility "to ensure that what's ahead is not just the end of a disease but a durable and hopeful future for all who sacrificed and endured during this unprecedented time."
Cook highlighted education as an essential place to focus, describing it as a "great equalizer" and drawing attention to Apple's own work through its Racial Equity and Justice Initiative before concluding:
The old saying goes that the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best time is today. If this pandemic has taught us anything, I hope it's that none of us can use injustice's long history as an excuse not to act. Our lives on this planet are precious and fleeting, and fate has a way of reminding us that society is only as strong as those who, for too long, have gone overlooked and undervalued.
