Tesla, White Supremacy, and The Invisible Gorilla
Owen Diaz was a contract elevator operator at Tesla’s Fremont manufacturing facility in Fremont, CA. Having been called the n-word over thirty times by Tesla employees during his time there, he endured the notoriously difficult process of suing the company for discrimination. At Tesla, he was told to “go back to Africa”, the initial excitement for the opportunity quickly extinguished by the horror of a “scene straight from the Jim Crow era.” Tesla fought the lawsuit tooth-and-nail. As of last week, the case is in the final stages of settlement.
Racial hostility at Tesla isn’t just a private matter anymore. As this is written, the State of California is suing Tesla for racial discrimination. According to a statement by the Department of Fair Employment and Housing, the State found “a racially segregated workplace where Black workers are subjected to racial slurs and discriminated against in job assignments, discipline, pay, and promotion.” It allegedly took Tesla months to remove a drawing of a noose in a public bathroom with “fuck n — — ” written next to it. In a comically inadequate statement, the company said it was “not perfect”. Characterizing the lawsuit as “unfair and counterproductive”, Tesla continues to deflect, evade and gaslight.
It will not be surprising if the reader encounters the information in the preceding paragraphs for the first time. Nor would it be a surprise if there was a vague, peripheral awareness of these stories — perhaps a memory of a headline — without much of an appetite for the details. These things happen. The bad guys get punished, the victim is made whole, we all move on.
Yet the documented racism at Tesla is worth our attention precisely because of the choice to focus on something else. Blowout party in Austin! Twitter takeover! Elon is at it again! When juxtaposed against all the news about Elon Musk we have been inundated with of late, the decade’s worth of egregiously abusive workplace conditions for Black workers at Tesla shed new light on our relationship with white supremacy. Sometimes we see it, but most of the time we give ourselves permission not to.
The murder of a Black man goes viral, compelling acknowledgement that Black lives matter. When the ugliness of systemic racism becomes obvious to an inconvenient degree, we defiantly pledge to stand against it, ratcheting up the social cost of these sins in the name of our salvation. And yet systemic racism in its most overt and repugnant form currently permeates the most popular company in America unabated. The silence is deafening.
What we collective chose not to see is one of the properties that has made white supremacy so durable. One of the famous psychological experiments in our time highlights the power of selective attention: a person in a gorilla suit walks past experiment subjects in plain sight and they remain oblivious reporting to never have seen it. The experiment highlights the power of humans to focus on something to the exclusion of all else. As Tesla and Elon Musk are celebrated, consider what the invisible gorilla could be. It is right in front of us.
