Elon Musk’s Vision Is Coming Into Focus—And It Looks a Lot Like Neo-Apartheid

Don’t get me wrong: they will still dabble in violence because the white people in Trump’s government appear to revel in violence. But racial violence against Black Americans is more of a fun pastime for the MAGA regime than the political necessity it was for their white South African counterparts. Now that they have control of all the levers of government, they can subjugate, oppress, and exploit Black labor through pure economic  means, just as long as white folks and especially white women stay in line and keep dutifully voting for white supremacy. 

It’s that kind of economic apartheid that I fear Musk, and his brazenly illegal DOGE organization, is trying to bring about here. Some will no doubt think my fear is overblown, and I hope it is, but let me put it this way: I can no longer tell you what the difference would be between a “pro-apartheid” presidential administration and the current administration, and I doubt you can either. Trump and Musk are calling the white South African diaspora “home”… to America; what else do they have to do to make other people see what they’re up to, dig up Nelson Mandela and put his body back in jail? 

Musk, even more than Trump, has a history of racially discriminatory business practices. Based on an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission lawsuit against his Tesla factory in California, Elon’s employment practices could be ripped straight from an apartheid handbook. (For the full, ugly story, check out The Nation’s extensive article from last year on “The Toxic Culture at Tesla”.) This is from the commission’s 2023 press release about the complaint: 

According to the EEOC’s suit, since at least 2015 to the present, Black employees at Tesla’s Fremont, California manufacturing facilities have routinely endured racial abuse, pervasive stereotyping, and hostility as well as epithets such as variations of the N-word, “monkey,” “boy,” and “black b*tch.” Slurs were used casually and openly in high-traffic areas and at worker hubs. Black employees regularly encountered graffiti, including variations of the N-word, swastikas, threats, and nooses, on desks and other equipment, in bathroom stalls, within elevators, and even on new vehicles rolling off the production line, the EEOC said.

The probe into Tesla’s practices has reportedly (and predictably) already been ended by the Trump administration. But if you understand how old-school South African apartheid worked, you’ll understand how Musk’s Tesla experience can be seen as a fledgling attempt to bring an apartheid-like system here, and update it for the modern age and the American context. 

First and most important, apartheid is a business plan. It’s a system designed to exploit cheap Black labor, without ever letting Black people reap the financial and social gains of hard work. The way they did it in South Africa was to bar Black people from rising from unskilled labor positions to “management.” They literally called it the “Colour Bar,” and it was introduced to South Africa even before full blown apartheid, in the 1911 Mine and Works Act, which functionally prohibited Blacks from holding skilled labor positions in the mining industry. Notably, the Mine and Works Act didn’t explicitly mention “race,” it just said that to hold a management position in the mining industry, or to be trained to hold such a position, you had to be certified by the government. The white government then did not certify any Black people to do the high-skilled jobs. 

In 20th Century South Africa, the mining industry was the country’s largest employer. In 21st Century America, the federal government is this country’s largest employer (both nationally and within every state, at least for now). Neo-apartheid could work very similarly in the United States if, say, you had some kind of quasi-governmental organization—call it a Department of Government Efficiency—in charge of “certifying” who can be hired for skilled positions throughout the government. Such certifications could be withheld from Black Americans, without even explicitly writing down “no Blacks need apply” if you have the right people in charge of the certification process. It would also help if you controlled, I don’t know, the Department of Education, and made it impossible or highly difficult for Black Americans to ever get the training, education, and experience needed to “earn” certification to work for the government. 

Still, while the federal government is the largest single employer, private industries employ significantly more people than the government. Apartheid-curious companies can be freed to do all the things Musk allegedly does at Tesla if the government agencies in charge of stopping them, like the EEOC, are hollowed out. Again, we see Musk and Trump doing that already. We see it with companies like Meta and Target rolling back “DEI policies,” which is really just a code for no longer hiring Black people. Right now, white employers are functionally free to ignore the Civil Rights Act and the 14th Amendment, and they are reacting with apartheid-esque glee. We see that many white American employers never really wanted to hire Black folks but were only doing so under the threat of lawsuits, and with those threats lifted, they are more than happy to go back to a “white’s only” approach to hiring standards. 

There is, I hope, one key economic aspect of South Africa’s model of apartheid that Musk and the other white South Africans flocking to his cause may have missed: while South African apartheid was good for the white working class, not just the country’s economic titans, America’s neo-apartheid plans are not. Everybody sees the benefits of exploiting cheap labor from the perspective of people like mine owners. But whites in South Africa (even “poor” whites) were not competing for the cheapest, most backbreaking jobs. They were the well-off farmers and middle managers of their society and, absent competition from the vast majority of Black people in the country, “working class” whites did very well for themselves, relatively speaking. (Indeed, if you really want to go deep into why apartheid ended, it has a lot to do with the international economic sanctions against the country taking too big of a bite out of the profit margins of the white business owners.) 

But Musk, as a mere scion of the privilege and wealth apartheid generated for the white business owners, doesn’t appear to be thinking too deeply about how his policies are going to wreck the white working class in this country. Or, more likely, he doesn’t care. To pass off his clearly disastrous plans of stripping away government services from people, white and Black, who need them, he’s begun warning about a period of “economic hardship” for whites living here now. But they are in for more than a period of tariff induced inflation. The smash-and-grab style of capitalism favored by the white business titans of modern America just doesn’t leave a lot left over for the white working class. There simply aren’t enough middle management positions available for all the white folks living here, so either they’re going to have to exclude Black and Latino labor from low skilled jobs (enjoy harvesting those tomatoes and making those license plates yourself, Chad), or white folks are going to have to compete with everybody else for the same exploitative work. Musk and his wealthy oligarch class can make a lot of money off a neo-apartheid system. Everybody else? Not so much. 

I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for the white working class to figure out why they still can’t afford eggs, though. The history of this country tells me that poor whites will put up with pretty much anything as long as they feel Black people are getting it worse. 

History doesn’t always repeat itself, but it does often rhyme. What I see now is a white South African manchild who is trying to reinstall the white world order of his homeland but reworked for our digital, late-stage-capitalist times. An American neo-apartheid system will share many of the economic goals of South Africa’s old system, but it won’t be the same. It’ll be different and unique in its own horribly oppressive, illegal, and immoral way. 

Still, something apartheid-like can happen here, is already happening here, and it will continue to happen here, if this is what white folks want. I can’t stop white people from getting what they want, I can only remind them what they’re asking for. And I can remind Black folks that, no matter how much crypto Musk offers you to sing and dance for his amusement, this guy will have us working in the mines if he continues to be given unchecked power.