Elon Musk calls US media and schools ‘racist against whites and Asians’

Elon Musk, the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla and Twitter, accused the “media,” and “elite colleges and high schools” of being “racist” against white and Asian people, who support his view without Sunday’s evidence.

Musk posted his comments on Twitter, where he boasts nearly 130 million followers, in response to news that media organizations across the country have decided to cut the comic strip “Dilbert” from syndication after its creator, Scott Adams, delivered a racist tirade in a video. on his YouTube channel last week.

In the video, Adams mentions a poll conducted by the right-leaning Rasmussen Reports that said 26% of Black respondents disagreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white.” The phrase referenced in their poll was labeled a “hate slogan” by the Anti-Defamation League. In his video, Adams called Black people who rejected that phrase a “hate group.”

Adams also said that he personally chose to live in a community where few or no black people lived, and then advised his white audience to “stay the hell away from black people ,” as he doesn’t “want to have anything to do with. them.”

Adams’ video was published during Black History Month in the US, which was established in 1976 by President Gerald Ford as a time to honor the struggles and contributions of Black Americans.

Among the news outlets that dropped “Dilbert” were The Los Angeles Times, The Oregonian, The Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Washington Post and USA Today.

Brian Levin, a civil rights attorney and director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University said, in response to Musk’s tweets:

“Systemic racism requires not only widespread bigotry to be practiced within a group but also a structural component that allows discrimination and oppression to be inflicted on a minority because of an advantage in access and power. One a white billionaire from South Africa who has just lost a high-profile case of racial discrimination may not be in the best position to give advice.”

As previously reported by CNBC, a federal court in San Francisco has ruled that Tesla must pay a former worker, Owen Diaz, for damages after he suffered a poor work environment and racist abuse at the company’s factory where he once worked as an elevator operator.

Additionally, the EEOC, a federal agency responsible for enforcing civil rights laws against discrimination in the workplace, issued a finding of cause against Tesla according to a financial filing from the company. last year.

Prior to the EEOC’s finding, the California Civil Rights Department (formerly known as the Department of Fair Employment and Housing) sued Tesla after a three-year investigation, alleging widespread racial discrimination at factories and facilities. at Tesla across the state.

The CRD alleged that Tesla kept Black workers in lower-level roles at the company even though they had the skills and experience to be promoted to higher roles; assigned Black workers more demanding, dangerous and dirty work in their facilities; and retaliated against Black workers who formally complained about what they suffered, including racist slurs used by managers.

Tesla called the CRD lawsuit “misguided,” and later counter-sued the agency.

Musk made his claims about the “media” and some higher education institutions and high schools in the US without showing any evidence.

Specifically, he wrote, “The media is racist.” He then added, “For a *very* long time, the US media was racist against non-white people, now they are racist against whites and Asians. The same is happening at elite colleges and high schools. in America. Maybe they can try not to be racist.”

According to Pew Research, newsroom employees are more likely to be white (and male) than the US workforce as a whole. In film and TV, according to McKinsey’s research, “Black talent is underrepresented across the industry, especially off screen.” Less than 6% of writers, directors, and producers of films made in the US are Black, McKinsey found.

According to the most recent available data from the US Census Bureau, about 29% of non-Hispanic white people in the US have achieved a bachelor’s degree or higher level of education, about 18.4% of Black people in the US have achieved that level of education, and about 51.3% of Asians have achieved that level of education.

Despite the educational attainment of Asian Americans, Asians are underrepresented in leadership roles in US academic libraries and higher education, according to research by Mihoko Hosoi, published in the Journal of Library Administration in 2022.

Musk also responded to a Twitter account that said unarmed white people affected by police violence only get a fraction of the media attention given to Black people injured or killed by police. Musk admitted that the media coverage was “way out of proportion to promoting a false narrative.”

According to Brookings Institute research, “Black people are 3.5 times more likely than white people to be killed by police when Black people are unarmed or unarmed,” and “Black teenagers 21 times more likely than white teenagers to be. killed by the police.”

Imran Ahmed, the CEO and founder of the Center for Countering Digital Hate said in response to Musk’s tweets, “Elon Musk seeks to portray himself as an awesome, awesome champion of anti-racism while in fact when he took over Twitter, he made a series of troubling decisions to change its rules to allow racist hate back on the platform and, as our research shows, to profit from of the controversy and attention that hate has caused.”

Ahmed also called on remaining advertisers to re-evaluate whether they want to spend their budgets on Twitter, given Musk’s beliefs and changes he has made to the Twitter platform.

Since leading a $44 billion leveraged buyout of Twitter late last year, and appointing himself “Chief Twit” or CEO, Musk has sparked controversy and lost money in the social media business.

Under Musk’s watch, Twitter restored the accounts of some previously banned and divisive figures, including neo-Nazi website founder Andrew Anglin. His moves led to an unprecedented rise in hate speech on the platform, the Center found, and drew immediate outcry from civil rights leaders.

Hundreds of Twitter’s top advertisers have stopped or pulled back on ad spending there. One company estimated that Twitter’s ad revenue fell as much as 70% in December from a year earlier, Reuters reported. Musk acknowledged in a tweet in November that the company suffered a “huge drop in revenue” after advertisers stopped spending on the social media platform.

Musk and representatives of Twitter, SpaceX, and Tesla did not immediately respond to requests for comment.