There’s quite a bit going on in the Metaverse around race this week.
Meta’s founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are shutting down the school for underprivileged children they started in 2016.
The utility serving Meta’s latest mega data center wants to pass on the energy bill to its customer base, 50% of whom are low-income, Black, and Latino residents of their coverage area.
Meta hires workers in Africa to handle tedious work for AI but they’re keeping it hush-hush by using third-party vendors to hire and manage workers.
The Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) will close operations of two San Francisco-area schools in 2026.
Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg, run CZI as a for profit charity to organize funding of groups they support.
Chan and Zuckerberg chose to start The Primary School in 2016 in an area of Northern California that has mostly Black and brown residents. Many of the Latino residents come from undocumented households.
This video shares more on the impact of the closing:
Parents point to the timing of the closings as a possible reason for CZI’s decision to wind down its direct educational program. They’re doing this because CZI provided no reason of its own as to why it’s closing The Primary School.
The New York Times reports the school invited parents to a bagel breakfast and made the announcement of the closings, without explanation. They did, however, outline a transition plan that would see students receive educational savings plans with seed funding of up to $10,000. That’s part of CZI’s $50 million plan to help students further their education away from the soon-to-be-defunct Primary School.
The Guardian revealed that employees of CZI were troubled when Meta rolled back its diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts.
CZI leadership reaffirmed the organization’s commitments to DEI and that its operations are separate of those at Meta.
Next up: Meta may leave low-income residents with a $5 billion bill for powering its new data center in Northeast Louisiana.
According to Business Insider, Entergy, the company that will provide power for the new Meta data center, wants to saddle its customers with the cost of building power plants big enough to keep the new data center humming.
While the data center, slated to open in 2030, will provide Northeast Louisiana with up to 500 high-paying jobs, Entergy’s customers may not see enough of a benefit from the three new power plants to cover the cost of their increased power bills. Here’s why:
By its own admission, half of Entergy’s customers are low-income, elderly, and disabled.
They live in economically challenged, rural areas (in many cases except for New Orleans). Here’s their coverage map from their 2024 report:
The average income of residents in these areas is $60,728. Only two of the 13 counties and parishes Entergy covers have an annual income above the national average (which is $77,719).
Here’s a link to the sources of data for this chart.
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