Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) appears to have struck a nerve by calling for Donald Trump to carry Elon Musk to the type of ethics standards set for presidency officers whereas the tech billionaire stays a significant determine within the president-elect’s orbit.
On social media Tuesday, Musk shared a sequence of racist pictures — apparently generated by synthetic intelligence — that depicted Warren and leaned closely on Native American stereotypes.
In one image, Warren is depicted sporting a beaded headdress adorned with hen feathers. The picture additionally imagined the senior Massachusetts senator sporting a buckskin shirt with leather-based fringe.
Subsequent posts by the world’s richest individual imagined Warren ― nonetheless proven in Native American garb ― eating cake and smiling gently whereas sporting some type of leather-based garment.
Musk included no clarification alongside the pictures, as a substitute posting a sequence of crying laughing emoji with the caption, “Guess who that is?”
The pictures seem like 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 take a look at outcomes from 2018 confirmed that Warren likely has a Native American ancestor however that the “overwhelming majority” of her ancestry is European.)
Lauren van Schilfgaarde, a legislation scholar and the assistant director of the Native Nations Legislation & Coverage Heart on the College of California, Los Angeles, informed HuffPost that the pictures are problematic on a wide range of ranges.
Setting apart Warren’s personal awkward ancestral claims, van Schilfgaarde stated that AI imagery represents Indigenous individuals as an amalgamation of racist tropes.
“That’s deeply problematic,” she stated. “As an alternative of recognizing Native peoples as distinct nations, they’re represented as one generic entity.”
However she discovered it fascinating that Musk would fall again on what she known as “quintessential racism” to reply to considerations about conflicts of curiosity and his continued presence in Trump’s life.
“It reveals he’s scared,” she ventured. “Responding to it on this trend appears to counsel he must distract from the substance of her critique.”
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