Over on our Instagram account for “The ReidOut,” one of the most popular posts from the past year was one that featured a show segment about Elon Musk’s and other right-wing financiers’ familial roots in apartheid South Africa. The caption asked whether MAGA could stand for “Make apartheid great again.”
In the segment, Joy discusses Musk, as well as Peter Thiel and David Sacks — all of whom are wealthy Republican benefactors whose families immigrated to the United States from apartheid South Africa when they were younger.
Over the past couple of years, this kind of coverage, about Musk in particular, has had the feel of a villain’s origin story — a way for some to try to understand the agar of toxic bigotry from which Musk emerged, to explain some of the racism he has come to espouse, and to possibly foresee his plans for the United States.
You can read more articles on Musk and South Africa here, here and here.
And if the disturbing comparisons between apartheid South Africa and the U.S. are of interest, you should check out a new documentary called “Ernest Cole: Lost and Found.” The film, released in November, was produced by filmmaker Raoul Peck, the creator behind the James Baldwin-inspired documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.” And it’s shot from the vantage point of Cole, the late South African filmmaker and photographer, as he flees from South Africa and arrives in the United States — only to discover that bigotry in America is even worse.
Cole’s journals, which are narrated by actor LaKeith Stanfield, portray a man who came to the U.S. with optimism before he was hit with crushing reality about the state of race relations in his new home.
Check out the trailer here:
This is a timely film that unites all sorts of conversations playing out in our current political landscape: about racial repression, whitewashed history, the myth of American exceptionalism, discrimination, fascism and the backlash to racial progress.
Personally, I interpreted it as a warning about the risks of failing to root out the bigoted ideologies gripping the United States today, and about how ignoring even seemingly minor indignities can have a cumulative effect over time.
Cole’s journal entries included the prescient warning below about the slippery slope of tolerating bigotry. I’ve thought about it as I’ve witnessed debates in the media and among Democrats about whether to placate President-elect Donald Trump, who has said his administration will prioritize tamping down “anti-white feeling.”
Cole wrote:
Legal indignities eventually become part of the reality of your existence — onerous, but unavoidable. What frightens and freezes are the sudden direct attacks on you as a person. The white man’s fear of blackness — and whatever it symbolizes for him — goads him unmercifully. His hatred erupts on slight provocation. One slip, one fancied slight, one ill-considered act or hasty word, and he is upon you, an enemy ablaze with rage and emboldened by his immunity. All blacks have seen white men and women thus. All have been tongue-lashed.