Even a cursory exploration of race and racism around the world would yield the conclusion that there is nothing simple about it. Racial identity and race-based oppression emerge, morph and erode in different ways in different parts of the world.
But leave it to Elon Musk to try to convince you that racism is simple and straightforward. Musk will tell you what is and is not “racist”. And he will explain to you which institutions are racist and to whom.
In response to disgraced cartoonist Scott Adams’ proclamation that African Americans constitute “a hate group”, newspapers across the US stopped publishing Adams’ long-running comic strip, Dilbert.
“Based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people,” Adams had said, in a YouTube rant. “Just get the fuck away,” he added. “I don’t think it makes any sense as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens any more […] I’m going to back off on being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off.”
It’s unclear what Adams has done in the past that was “helpful to Black America”, but he is certain to avoid doing so in the future. Meanwhile, Musk defended Adams and argued that US institutions perpetrate racism against white people.
Musk, raised by a parent who owned part of an emerald mine, is a serial CEO who runs a company that treated at least one Black employee poorly enough to generate massive damages.
Such a person could have a sophisticated sense of how race and racism work. After all, Musk grew up in apartheid-era South Africa, a country marked by violent segregation of Black and white citizens, with Asians caught in the middle and accepted by neither. He moved to multicultural Canada, with its own history of genocide and exclusion of Indigenous Canadians, and made his name and expanded his inherited fortune in Silicon Valley, a part of the US enriched by an immigrant labor force, a male-dominated-yet-cosmopolitan elite class, and massive race- and ethnicity-based segregation and displacement.
Had Musk lived with his eyes and ears open, he might offer us, from his position of great influence, a sense of sensitivity and humanity. It’s not hard, growing up in such milieus, to grasp history and politics in ways that grant dignity and understanding to many different experiences. Instead, Musk expresses his awareness of race, inequality, and injustice like a 12-year-old might.
It might be too easy to pick on Musk, who clearly has limited faculties to understand the world in which he is a major, powerful player. And Adams is not the sort of person one should expect to rise to the level of valuable conversation about anything of importance.
So perhaps we should instead look to our own fascination with the super-wealthy or famous and the respect we give them. Why does Musk deserve our concern? Why does he send so many of us (myself included) into apoplectic fits of anger and frustration?
We might distinguish between the influential and the powerful. When basketball star Kyrie Irving lauds an antisemitic film, he deserves opprobrium, even shame. When JK Rowling rants against trans women, deploying her massive platform against the powerless, we should be stern in our criticism of such “punching down”. When Adams, who does not have any real power, makes a fool of himself, he only really harms himself and the outlets that publish his little cartoons, which is why so many quickly exercised their first amendment right to refrain from publishing his comic.
Irving, Rowling and Adams have influence, but mostly on those who are already like-minded. We should be appalled that such comfortable, famous people take it upon themselves to make others the victims of their paranoid ire. But they are more representative of noxious positions held by millions of others. Those millions live among us. Perhaps indignation against the loudest and richest bigots is not generating a significant intended effect. The rush to defend Irving, Rowling, Adams and others reveals just how deeply they strike sympathy among the like-minded.
This does not mean we should refrain from such admonition. But it should give us pause. Is mere admonition – against those least likely to suffer from meager shaming or the occasional, temporary commercial sanction – the best way to address serious societal ills?
Few celebrities beyond Donald Trump promoted QAnon conspiracy theories, but violence rose from followers anyway. The danger grew acute when Trump, himself a key figure in the QAnon mythology, promoted direct action against the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. QAnon would be dangerous even if Trump had not made a speech that morning.
Our challenge is that bigotry such as racism, homophobia, misogyny and transphobia are built into our cultural habits and baked into the data and processes that guide our lives. The views of an individual, even one as famous as JK Rowling, don’t matter as much as we might assume.
But what of Musk and his record? His hostility to trans people is well documented. Yet Musk has rarely spoken directly about race or racism in his long, public life. Musk’s peculiar worldview reveals a more troubling ideology than mere vulgar bigotry.
There are disturbing aspects to Musk’s weird obsession with population. It echoes the “great replacement” theory, a white-supremacist framework that presumes demographic changes will overrun white populations and thus threaten their power. It sparks deep, historical fears of “mongrel breeding”. Replacement has been the explicit fear of antisemites and anti-immigrant extremists in North America and Europe for decades. It has inspired violence around the world, and is a cousin to the deadly anti-Muslim conspiracy theory of a “love jihad” in India. Musk is, as usual, unable to distinguish between fact and fiction when he discusses demography.
Bluntly, Musk is more dangerous, even with his half-articulated and oddball positions, than any mere celebrities. Musk is both a celebrity who can focus the world’s attention on a fringe question with just a tweet and an employer of thousands of people he can actually harm with his company’s policies and practices.
The state of California has sued Musk’s car company, Tesla, for allegedly discriminating against Black employees. (Tesla denies the allegations, and is fighting the suit.) His anti-trans eruptions must make trans employees at his various companies wonder if they would be treated fairly by management. Musk has mocked a former top Twitter employee, who was driven from his home after Musk implied that the employee, who is gay, tolerates pedophilia.
Musk’s policies at Twitter have invited back many accounts that had been banned in the past for violating various policies. Expressions of hatred and racism on the service have spiked, leaving Twitter users less safe and comfortable expressing themselves. This squelching of speech rarely gets acknowledged by Musk or his fans. So the damage to the public continues and Musk remains oblivious and unconcerned.
Bigotry, and the harassment and violence it inspires, robs all of us of the richest possible public life. Deep conspiracies that rest on demographic myths and fears about “replacement” seed trends that could spark genocidal violence. Such violence – even the threat of violence – silence those who most yearn to be heard and those who have been heard the least. For anyone to purport to support a rich and diverse public sphere, it’s imperative to understand and resist bigotry and racialized conspiracy theories in all their forms.
Democracy depends on decency.
Siva Vaidhyanathan is a professor of media studies at the University of Virginia and the author of Antisocial Media: How Facebook Disconnects Us and Undermines Democracy
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