Elon Musk, Tesla receive lesson in Black confidence
Deflating Black confidence has long been an American pastime, but that’s starting to change as more people are refusing to tolerate it and speaking out. Elon Musk and the folks at Tesla were recently introduced to this idea when a jury put an exact dollar value on the N-word and ordered Tesla to pay up.
Owen Diaz, an African American former elevator operator at Tesla’s plant outside San Francisco, sued the company for failing to address a persistent pattern of racial discrimination and harassment. Diaz complained to his bosses about frequently being called the N-word and about racist caricatures, Swastikas and offensive comments scrawled on factory walls. When it became clear that his bosses had no intention of addressing his complaints — or the similar complaints of his colleagues — Diaz laid his frustrations before a jury.
Most African Americans reading about Diaz’s treatment at Tesla understand immediately what was happening. We recognize the signs. We know the patterns. We understand when someone is trying to put us in our place — to break us.
What happened to Diaz is no different than a bunch of teenagers yelling “Go Back to Africa” from the window of a passing car. Or a stranger in a public park calling the police on us because we “don’t look like we belong there.” Or when a woman, in a spitting rage, physically assaults one of our children because they’re holding an iPhone that happens to look identical to the one she just lost. We know all the direct and subtle things racists do to communicate their perceived superiority to us. Isabel Wilkerson, the Pulitzer Prize winning author, wrote a whole book on the subject.
In “Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents,” Wilkerson argues that American society is similar to the caste system of India in that it is built on an “artificially constructed, fixed and embedded ranking of human value.” In the American version, Black inferiority is set against the presumed superiority of whites. In Wilkerson’s description, a person’s whole existence can be wrapped up in the color of their skin and the presumed privileges that skin color connotes. The American caste society is one in which an invested person will deliberately act against their own financial, social or even civic interests to preserve the privileges they associate with their skin color.
Wilkerson was not the first to float such an idea. Almost two hundred years earlier, the civil rights leader Frederick Douglass came to a similar conclusion when he compared American society to a “skin aristocracy.” Speaking during a tour of England in the mid 1800s, Douglass described his home country as a place where Blacks are hated, but where “hatred of the American was especially roused against the intellectual colored man. When he is degraded, they can bear with him; he is in the condition which they think natural to him; but if he is intelligent and moral, then there is a contradiction to their theory … an American would not tolerate him.”
In Douglass’s day, enforcing America’s “skin aristocracy” was achieved by a combination of threats and physical and psychological abuse. The observant can see similarities in the harassment Diaz suffered between 2015 and 2016 at Tesla.
In his autobiography, Douglass described the six months he was sent to live with what was referred to as a “Nigger Breaker.” Douglass’ so called “master” sent him to the home of Edward Covey for “correction,” because he believed Douglass had grown too full of himself. Psychological abuse was a key component of Covey’s success. His method was to keep the enslaved in a constant state of nervous agitation. He would achieve this by secretly hiding among them and springing up when and where they least expected. Whether they were working in the field or performing some mundane task, Covey might jump out from behind a tree at any moment and threaten them physically for any number of arbitrary offenses.
Douglass described the debilitating effect this had on his mental health: “I was broken in body, soul and spirit. My natural elasticity was crushed, my intellect languished … the cheerful spark that lingered about my eye died.”
Similar to Owen Diaz’s experience at Tesla, Covey’s goal with Douglass was to remind him of his place — to break him. Every time someone called Diaz the N-word at Tesla or referred to him as “boy,” they were trying to remind him of his place — to break him.
When Diaz’s supervisor drew a face on a box with “oversize mouth, big eyes and a bone stuck in the patch of hair with the word ‘Booo’ written underneath,” Diaz understood exactly what the supervisor was doing.
And so did the San Francisco jury that awarded him $137 million for punitive damages.