Senator Elizabeth Warren seems to have struck a nerve by calling for Donald Trump to hold Elon Musk to the kind of ethics standards set for government officials while the tech billionaire remains a major figure in the president-elect’s orbit.
On social media Tuesday, Musk shared a series of racist images — apparently generated by artificial intelligence — that depicted Warren and leaned heavily on Native American stereotypes.
In one image, Warren is depicted wearing a beaded headdress adorned with bird feathers. The image also imagined the senior Massachusetts senator wearing a buckskin shirt with leather fringe.
Subsequent posts by the world’s richest person imagined Warren ― still shown in Native American garb ― eating cake and smiling gently while wearing some sort of leather garment.
Musk included no explanation alongside the images, instead posting a series of crying laughing emoji with the caption, “Guess who this is?”
The images appear to be a reference to Trump’s racist nickname for Warren, “Pocahontas,” which is itself derived from Warren’s own tangled claims of Native American ancestry.
(DNA test results from 2018 showed that Warren likely has a Native American ancestor but that the “vast majority” of her ancestry is European.)
Lauren van Schilfgaarde, a law scholar and the assistant director of the Native Nations Law & Policy Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, told HuffPost that the images are problematic on a variety of levels.
Setting aside Warren’s own awkward ancestral claims, van Schilfgaarde said that AI imagery represents Indigenous people as an amalgamation of racist tropes.
“That’s deeply problematic,” she said. “Instead of recognising Native peoples as distinct nations, they’re represented as one generic entity.”
But she found it interesting that Musk would fall back on what she called “quintessential racism” to respond to concerns about conflicts of interest and his continued presence in Trump’s life.
“It shows he’s scared,” she ventured. “Responding to it in this fashion seems to suggest he needs to distract from the substance of her critique.”
