Holy hell this thread. It's amazing how many people here are jumping in to say "but what about (the stock price), (other companies), (Tesla's lgbtq record), (photo evidence), (...)?" and sow your own deflection and FUD, nevermind that the things alleged in the article are things that black workers in the US have faced for decades/centuries.
Y'all are for real out of touch with the 2018 America experience for people of color if you think things like this are just hit pieces set up by shorty shorts.
There's a difference between "racists existing at a company" and "the company being racist". So long as the company has a strong policy against racist behavior - and enforces it - they're behaving properly. Such as the case where Tesla dismissed a contractor for racist graffiti.
That's not how the NYT is trying to portray it, however. They're trying to portray it as the
company being racist, and willfully ignoring or even encouraging racism. That's an entirely different issue. The NYT ran this big spread based on accusations that are a year old, without a peep on
current, admitted incidents of racism at GM.
Perhaps I'm a bit more sensitive to this than most because I remember on 2 or 3 occasions during my father's career, his department was the target of lawsuits alleging racism. Now, I'm not in any way afraid to call out a family member for any perception of racism (example: my mother's father had some "Early-to-mid 1900s Chicago policeman" attitudes towards minorities, and I can see bits of it rubbed off in my mother, although I doubt she has any clue about that). But my father is one of the least racist people I could think of - very much an internationalist, we're-all-the-same type of person. What he always was, however, was a very tough boss. And he or those under him would repremand or fire people who weren't pulling their weight or doing bad things. This happened of course many, many times - which is what happens when you're a high-ranking exec in a major company with tens of thousands of employees. And on a couple occasions, people who were fired who happened to be minorities filed suit alleging that it was because of their race. Each time, the company presented the evidence as to the person's poor performance or misbehavior, and each time, the courts sided with the company, and the case was dismissed. And it was painful to my father each time it happened, because it was effectively calling him a racist, even though he was just doing his job in keeping the company performing by getting rid of poor-performing (or misbehaving) employees.
This sort of thing is
pretty much guaranteed to happen in any large company. Thankfully for the companies my father worked for, there wasn't a media campaign seeking to destroy them. A responsible journalist would never sensationalize mere allegations and try to make them into a big hit piece (while ignoring the same at competitors) and keep bringing them up a year after they were first reported on. But when it comes to Tesla and journalists who hate it, that's the entire name of the game - find anything you can hit them with, even mere allegations, no context or comparison, play them up, and keep hitting Tesla with it over and over again. Which is why they're known as
hit pieces.
