Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) 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.
Musk shared a series of racist images of Warren on social media on Tuesday, which appear to have been generated by artificial intelligence and rely heavily on Native American stereotypes.
Warren is depicted in one image wearing a beaded headdress with bird feathers. The image also depicted the senior Massachusetts senator in a buckskin shirt with leather fringe.
Subsequent posts by the world’s richest person imagined Warren in Native American garb, eating cake and smiling gently while wearing a leather garment.
Musk provided no explanation for the images, instead posting a series of crying laughing emojis with the caption, “Guess who this is?”
The images appear to be a reference to Trump’s racist nickname for Warren, “Pocahontas,” which stems from Warren’s own tangled Native American ancestry claims.
(DNA test results from 2018 revealed that Warren likely has a Native American ancestor, but the “vast majority” of her ancestry is European.)
Lauren van Schilfgaarde, a law scholar and assistant director of the Native Nations Law & Policy Center at the University of California, Los Angeles, told HuffPost that the images are problematic on multiple levels.
Setting aside Warren’s awkward ancestral claims, van Schilfgaarde claims that AI imagery depicts Indigenous people as a mash-up of racist tropes.
“That’s deeply problematic,” she said. “Instead of recognizing Native peoples as distinct nations, they’re represented as one generic entity.”
However, she found it interesting that Musk would resort to what she called “quintessential racism” in response to concerns about conflicts of interest and his continued presence in Trump’s life.
“It shows he’s scared,” she said. “Responding to it in this fashion seems to suggest he needs to distract from the substance of her critique.”
