Dozens of Black employees at Tesla are suing the company for a workplace culture they say was deeply racist– from slurs and inequitable treatment to harassment by colleagues. Their allegations echo the type of racist rhetoric the company’s CEO, Elon Musk, has repeatedly amplified.
Significance. Black employees at Tesla main plant in California say they faced a near daily onslaught of racist taunts and were relentlessly bullied by coworkers and bosses. In their suit, the Black employees also say they were paid inequitably and denied promotions.
Early in the trial, lawyer Brett Watson with the California Civil Rights Department displayed pictures from Tesla’s warehouse in Fremont, Calif. — hateful slurs such as the N-word and the words “go back to Africa!” as well as racist symbols ranging from swastikas, to “KKK” to the Confederate flag were etched on various surfaces, according to The Guardian.
Black Tesla workers at the Fremont factory also said peers, supervisors, and management called Black workers as “slaves” and the factory a “plantation“
Power structure. Employees at the center of the lawsuit say they repeatedly raised concerns; however, racism was allowed to fester and continue. They also reported facing retaliation when complaining about the racist and offensive conditions in the form of “overly harsh performance reviews, reprimands, and termination,” according to the Civil Rights Department of the State of California.
Meanwhile, Musk was very active in the media, making racist, xenophobic, and offensive statements about many different communities of color.
For example, Musk made a post on X promoting the Great Replacement theory, a White supremacist conspiracy theory that Black and Brown people are replacing White people.
Overlooked angle. Musk has previously denied being racist because he has an Indian wife and part Indian children. In an interview with The Economist, which came out in July, Musk said that one of his kids is named after an Indian physicist, and therefore he was not racist.
A fact check done by The Emancipator found that simply having loved ones in your life that are not White doesn’t excuse racist behavior or allow someone to simply be called “not racist.”
What experts say. Scholar and anti-racist educator Dr. Ibram Kendi has pushed back on this type of logic, since it misconstrues what it means to be racist.
“This is an example of what I call proximity denial because you have these wealthy individuals or even politicians all over the world, frankly, who have spouses of color, children of color, or even who have members of their political party who are, let’s say, Black and Brown, and they typically use these people of color as props to argue that they can’t be racist,” said Kendi in a previous statement to The Emancipator.
