Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) appears to have struck a nerve by calling for Donald Trump to carry Elon Musk to the sort of ethics requirements 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 collection of racist photographs — apparently generated by synthetic intelligence — that depicted Warren and leaned closely on Native American stereotypes.
In one picture, 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 ― consuming cake and smiling gently whereas sporting some form of leather-based garment.
Musk included no rationalization alongside the photographs, as an alternative posting a collection of crying laughing emoji with the caption, “Guess who this is?”
The photographs look like a reference to Trump’s racist nickname for Warren, “Pocahontas,” which is itself derived from Warren’s personal tangled claims of Native American ancestry.
(DNA check outcomes from 2018 confirmed that Warren doubtless has a Native American ancestor however that the “vast majority” of her ancestry is European.)
Lauren van Schilfgaarde, a legislation scholar and the assistant director of the Native Nations Law & Policy Center on the University of California, Los Angeles, advised HuffPost that the photographs are problematic on quite a lot 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. “Instead of recognizing Native peoples as distinct nations, they’re represented as one generic entity.”
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But she discovered it attention-grabbing that Musk would fall again on what she referred to as “quintessential racism” to answer considerations about conflicts of curiosity 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.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/elon-musk-elizabeth-warren-pocahontas-images_n_676336a9e4b02d22ce099c90