Tech billionaire Elon Musk continued his latest pattern of incendiary musings Friday morning when he shared a submit evaluating variety, fairness and inclusion packages to legal guidelines designed to disenfranchise Black People.
“DEI is racism and sexism,” wrote Musk, replying to a submit on X — the social media platform he owns — that learn “Jim Crow and DEI.”
Whereas the comparability is, at greatest, wildly out of proportion, Musk’s ongoing assault on DEI probably gained him some factors from the MAGA base. Lots of Donald Trump’s most fervent supporters have lashed out towards Musk for supporting H-1B visas, which permit U.S. employers to rent international staff for specialty jobs, primarily within the tech sector. Musk initially got here to America on a H-1B visa.
Whether or not his views replicate an effort of political appeasement or maybe one thing darker is up for debate.
However there’s no denying the Tesla founder’s posts on X have change into more and more strident and polarizing. He lately endorsed AfD, a controversial neo-Nazi political get together in Germany, and, just some days, known as for the discharge of far-right provocateur Tommy Robinson from a British jail.
Robinson is serving an 18-month jail sentence for contempt of court docket after posting a video libeling a Syrian refugee teenager as a violent thug.
Musk additionally subscribes to a pro-apartheid “X” account, which usually disparages South Africa’s Black inhabitants whereas calling for energy to be returned to whites. Since buying X, then referred to as Twitter, Musk has reinstated a slew of accounts that push hate, claiming to be defenders of free speech.
His most up-to-date broadside towards DEI led some individuals to social media to remind readers a few bevy of racial discrimination lawsuits which have been filed towards Tesla. In a single federal go well with, a former Black contractor was awarded $137 million from the carmaker.
The plaintiff, Owen Diaz, who labored at Tesla’s manufacturing unit in Fremont, California, from 2015 to 2016, stated he and different contractors had been routinely known as the N-word by Tesla staff. He claimed he was instructed to “return to Africa” and that staff drew racist and derogatory footage and left them across the manufacturing unit.
Working for Tesla “was like a scene straight out of Jim Crow,” Diaz stated.
In the meantime, a California state choose has dominated that almost 6,000 Black manufacturing unit staff can sue Tesla as a bunch for allegedly failing to handle racial discrimination and harassment. And the U.S. Equal Employment Alternative Fee has charged Tesla continues to violate federal legislation in its tolerance of harassment of Black staff.
Musk’s newest submit about DEI drew some condemnation from readers who say the world’s richest man is blind to his privilege.
“I imply, I’m not shocked,” wrote one. “Even your fellow Whites in South Africa who benefited from Apartheid imagine that Broadbased Black Financial Empower and Transformation are “racist” concepts. If you’re used to privilege, equality and fairness seems like oppression. RACISTS!”
One other X person requested, “Weren’t you born in a rustic that applied The Apartheid? You and your loved ones had been NOT native South Africans nevertheless you all benefited from segregation and mistreatment of the indigenous individuals in South Africa who’re Black….”
The submit shared by Musk, equating DEI and Jim Crow, has obtained a whopping 18.8 million views. It was written by X person @CynicalPublius, who says he’s “a white man married to a Black girl for over 30 years.”
After detailing among the horrors of Jim Crow, he shared his expertise at his agency’s annual DEI coaching seminar.
“I needed to sit there silently whereas I used to be knowledgeable that I had earned not one of the issues that I earned via my very own blood, sweat and tears; that I used to be inherently and unchangeably inferior due to the colour of my pores and skin and my genitalia; that each one that I owned and am had been solely there attributable to “privilege” and the “patriarchy”; and that if I spoke out towards any of this, it solely proved my racism and my ignorance as to my very own privilege,” he wrote.
Whereas acknowledging his analogy was “removed from excellent,” he continued making an attempt to make the purpose.
“I used to be supposed to only sit there silently and “know my place,” he stated. “This was an INDIGNITY. I knew it, they knew it, and if I had been to talk up—if I had been to be “uppity”—an actual potential existed that important financial and social hurt would come crashing down on me. So as a result of I like my household, I stored my mouth shut. I sat silently and steamed. My soul corroded a bit bit that day.”
He fails to say that Jim Crow legal guidelines would’ve prohibited his marriage to a Black girl. It’s protected to imagine his voting rights haven’t been restricted, neither is it probably he’s ever been forbidden from utilizing public lodging.
