Guilt-tripping black people into liking Elon Musk won’t work
Guilt-tripping black people into liking Elon Musk won’t work
Yes, he’s South African. No, that doesn’t make him our hero.
If there was an instruction manual on Black People, there is a massive group of people who left the paperwork in the box. They absolutely don’t know how we operate.
In possibly the strangest guilt trip I’ve ever heard, a Twitter user (because where else?) left the following message to a black woman posting an Elon Musk Karen meme — “One of the richest people on the planet is African-American and you’re making fun of him? He was actually born in Africa too, unlike you.”
I stared blankly at this tweet for a while before furrowing my eyebrows. Yes, it’s true that Elon Musk was born in Pretoria, South Africa in 1971. I don’t dispute that he spent his K-12 years in South Africa before moving to Canada as an adult. But where on Earth does that make it mandatory for the African-American population to stand guard for him?
Recommended Read: “Life before slavery: African history gets the silent treatment in U.S. schools ~ Teaching U.S.’s mistreatment of Africans is important, but what about pre-slavery?”
One, it makes it seem like all black people love each other and have no distinct personality. “You black, I’m black, we black, that’s that.” No! It’s a little more complicated than that. Just as every Asian person, white person, Hispanic person, Christian person, Jewish person, gardener, dog lover, cat lady or anybody else may have some things in common, that doesn’t mean we immediately must put on a superhero cape and say, “We are the exact same makeup because we have this one thing in common.”
Two, it’s missing a great big history lesson, specifically this part, “He was actually born in Africa too, unlike you.”