My Grandmom, “Sissy” (God rest her soul) used to have a saying for people who said something stupid—your grandmother probably said something similar also. When a person said something stupid she would say that they “don’t know their a** from a hole in the ground.” I chuckled every time she said it. She would laugh when she saw me laughing, and then we’d laugh hysterically together. Those were good times.
In the words of my late grandmother, Elon Musk does not know his a** from a hole in the ground.
He recently tweeted a video saying schools should teach about the role of Great Britain and the U.S. in ending enslavement saying, “Children should be proud that Whites in the West ended slavery worldwide, which had existed for thousands of years.
Again, this man doesn’t know his a** from a hole in the ground.
Musk is extremely ignorant and there’s no need to be angered by his asinine assertion because the man is a fool. When I was a younger man, I would have been extremely bothered by these comments and ready to argue with every conservative I found on social media promoting this BS. But I’ve learned over the years that this is the way racists think, and it’s because racism is embedded in every aspect of our society. When history is taught accurately, you can make the connection between the past and the present. This means understanding that our current political and economic circumstances are a product of this nation’s settler-colonial past, rooted in genocide, enslavement, patriarchy, and capitalism. When amalgamized, those things yield white supremacy.
Here’s the truth: The West (the United States and Western Europe) never ended enslavement. In fact, the western world expanded enslavement to levels never seen before European Colonization.
Ending the transport of Africans for the purpose of enslavement didn’t bring about the end of the practice, just a formal end to transporting Africans. A shift in strategy—and one last ship, the Clotilda, arrived in the U.S. in 1860. 52 years after the Importation Clause of the Constitution took hold.
What the Western world did was pivot. The U.S. forced Africans to procreate while the British and the rest of Europe invaded Africa, Asia, and Australia and forced the people there to work. In other words, they enslaved them.
Colonization introduced chattel slavery, based on the European-invented concept of race, to the world, where African people (as well as indigenous people before Africans) were designated property to be exploited physically for business and pleasure. Enslavement came to an end in Mexico, the Caribbean, and South America due to independence movements that African people either led or heavily participated in. Meanwhile, the U.S. had no intention of ending enslavement. Abraham Lincoln himself said so.
According to Dr. Dubois, it was the general strike of Africans leaving the plantation that forced Lincoln’s hand. As well as the fact that he needed more soldiers to fight. Even then, after the Civil War and passage of 13th Amendment, enslavement continues in this country for the incarcerated.
Thus, the anti-Black racism seen in laws from the Black Codes to sentencing disparities for possession of crack cocaine versus powder facilitated the mass incarceration of Black people and continued the legacy of enslavement in the United States. This along with for-profit prisons and judges who disproportionately sentence Black people to prison continue the system of slavery.
Britain joined with other European colonizers to divide Africa amongst themselves, taking resources away from Africans all over the continent while ruling them simultaneously. They were mum regarding Leopold II’s enslaving of the Congolese and his murdering of 10 million humans as a result of their enslavement and torture. The British likely excused this since based on their own historical memory of the slave trade to force Africans to work in the territories they occupied.
According to Caroline Elkins’s book Legacy of Violence: A History of the British Empire, Great Britain engaged in liberal imperialism, which fused a rhetoric of progress and rule of law with systematic coercion against colonized populations whenever they resisted, as well as legalized lawlessness, the use of emergency regulations, special ordinances, and ad‑hoc legal changes that effectively authorized otherwise illegal acts—arbitrary detention, torture, censorship, collective punishment—under the guise of restoring order.
This looked like detention and work camps of hard labor, where working was never really a choice. Kenya being a prime example, where the Kikuyu people faced persecution from the British, made worse after the Mau Mau uprising.
Unfortunately, enslavement continues to exist today in various forms: forced labor, forced marriage, human trafficking, and debt bondage. According to the most recent numbers of the Modern Slavery Index from 2021, an estimated 50 million people are enslaved around the world, particularly in Eastern Europe, Asia, and the SWANA region, none of which the U.S., Great Britain, or the West has stopped.
Usually, I don’t write about Elon Musk. But I feel compelled to teach when blatantly racist, ignorant people say something racist, ignorant, and uneducated loudly enough for others to hear, with the potential for convincing those within earshot they’re right. This is why we need Black educators, historians, journalists, elders, activists, and others within the community to speak and teach when racist pseudo-history is put in the atmosphere.
Elon Musk is racist and wrong. So, as my students would say, he must be clocked—for the sake of teaching truth. The truth is that the West—white settler colonizers—would bring enslavement back with the quickness if they could, and if we’re not speaking out about the rollback of Black history in schools, history might repeat itself.
That’s not hyperbole; it’s actual, and it’s factual.
