Uber announced this week that its food delivery service will stop charging delivery fees when users order from black-owned restaurants.
“I wish that the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, Breonna Taylor, and countless others weren’t so violently cut short,” Uber CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said in an email to employees explaining why recent events justify the change in pricing. “I wish that institutional racism, and the police violence it gives rise to, didn’t cause their deaths.”
Khosrowshahi added that the waiving of delivery fees for black-owned restaurants will last for the “remainder of the year.”
Uber is also offering discounted rides to black-owned businesses that have been “hit hard by COVID-19.”
Khosrowshahi added that the company is going to crack down on discrimination and asked users who don’t want to abide by the new rules to delete the app.
“I respectfully ask anyone not willing to abide by these rules to delete Uber,” he wrote.
Uber’s decision comes in response to the death of an unarmed black man named George Floyd on May 25 while in police custody in Minneapolis, which has sparked peaceful protests, looting, and riots across the country.
Floyd can be seen on video lying on the ground as a white police officer knelt on his neck for almost nine minutes while onlookers begged him to stop.
The police officer was later charged with second-degree murder, and three other officers were charged with aiding and abetting murder.
