Elon Musk posts racist image, responds to Elizabeth Warren’s call for moral standards
Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., called on Donald Trump to hold Elon Musk to ethical standards for government officials, while the tech billionaire remains Being a major figure in the presidential election seemed to hit a nerve with him.
Musk took to social media on Tuesday to share a series of apparently racist images generated by artificial intelligence that depicted Warren and relied heavily on Native American stereotypes.
In one photo, Warren wears a beaded headdress decorated with bird feathers. The image also imagines the senior senator from Massachusetts wearing a deerskin shirt with leather fringes.
In a subsequent post, the world’s richest man imagined Warren – still dressed in Native American garb – wearing some kind of leather jacket, eating cake and smiling softly.
Musk didn’t offer any explanation alongside the image, instead posting a series of crying-laughing emojis with the caption “Guess who this is?”
The images appear to be a reference to Trump’s racist nickname for Warren, “Pocahontas,” which itself stemmed from Warren’s own tangled claims to Native American ancestry.
(DNA testing in 2018 showed that Warren may have Native American ancestry, but the “vast majority” of her ancestors are European.)
Lauren van Schilfgaarde, a legal scholar and associate director of the UCLA Center for Indigenous Law and Policy, told The Huffington Post that these images are problematic on many levels.
Warren’s own embarrassing ancestry claims aside, Van Hilfgaard said the AI imagery depicts Native people as a fusion of racist tropes.
“This is a serious problem,” she said. “Instead of being seen as different peoples, they were seen as a universal entity.”
But she found it interesting that Musk would resort to what she called “classic racism” in response to concerns about conflicts of interest and his continued presence in Trump’s life.
“It shows he’s scared,” she ventured. “Responding in this way seemed to indicate that he needed to distract from the substance of her criticism.”
