TESLA | RACISM | SOCIETY

Tesla’s Lawyer Called the N-Word a “Term of Endearment” in Court. Here’s What It Costs Them If They Lose.

Week one of California’s trial over Black workers at Tesla’s Fremont plant, the receipts already on the record, and what nobody in that courtroom wants to talk about.

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Ok folks…

There is some VERY strong language ahead because that’s the only tone I have for racist dog-shit assholes.

Color me shocked, but of course the lawyers for a company owned by a white Apartheid South African racist Nazi would be in court arguing that the n-word is a term of endearment.

…did all of you hear what the hell I just said?

A goddamn term of endearment.

Let me catch my breath.

Folks, I’m so goddamn tired of these corny ass racists citing rap music to ASK SOCIETY to embrace them being racist.

Let me get to who and what I’m talking about.

Tesla, Elmo’s tanking company is in court trying desperately to not get hit with uncapped damages because sworn testimony has been getting out that Black employees at Tesla have been called “nigger” like A LOT by multiple non-Black employees and even managers I believe.

Now of course now that you know who we’re talking about, I’m sure none of you are shocked.

But let me give you the details here and also what’s NOT being said which is the part I’m concerned with the most.

Monday, September 21, Oakland, Alameda County Superior Court, and California’s Civil Rights Department finally gets its day, a case they filed back in February 2022 after almost three years of digging through hundreds of worker complaints, no jury, just Judge Peter Borkon deciding the whole thing, trial’s set to run through October 30.

Tesla’s trial lawyer, Tyree P. Jones Jr., opens by citing Kanye West and Jay-Z lyrics to say the n-word can be a “term of respect and endearment” in the Black community. Then he tells the judge, “This trial is not about the N-word — the N-word is not on trial here.”

Endearment. Endearment. Endearment.

Now hold that up against what the state showed the court, photographs from inside the Fremont factory, the n-word scratched into metal, written in marker on the walls, swastikas, Confederate flags, KKK, nooses, up in bathrooms and lockers and lunch areas, some of it left there for days. The state’s lawyer, Brett Watson, says one Black employee told investigators he heard slurs as often as fifty to a hundred times in one day. Fifty to a hundred. One day. Somebody show me the endearment.

Watson also told the court the evidence will show managers calling Tesla “the plantation,” some of them calling themselves and Elon Musk “slave masters,” and workers calling the place a “slaveship.” His line to the judge was

“These experiences cannot be dismissed as a few bad apples.”

Then the witnesses. First one up, Ryan Edwards, former Tesla worker, says a non-Black coworker called him the n-word, cursed at him, threatened to beat him up, he reported it right away, and a month later he finds out his managers wrote him up over it.

Wrote **HIM **up... sit with that bullshit…

After that he applies to more than a hundred jobs and doesn’t move up.

Second one, Ozell Murray, former regional security manager, testifies his supervisor, Ray Sethna, now Tesla’s senior director of global security, told him to warn a Black Marine veteran he was hiring, “just be sure [the veteran] knows he’ll be called those words.” A Marine. Told in advance, like it’s part of the onboarding packet.

Then Edwards closes out his testimony by telling the judge that last week Timothy Kim, senior corporate counsel on Tesla’s employment litigation team, left him a voicemail saying he was handling the Tesla civil rights case and kept him on the phone about thirty minutes, steering him toward saying Tesla wasn’t a bad place to work, maybe the best job he ever had. Edwards already had a lawyer, Kim offered to represent him anyway, asked what settlements he’d signed or would consider, and Edwards says he only figured out Kim was on Tesla’s side when Kim started reciting his old managers’ names. Until then he thought he was talking to the state.

Then the state’s attorney, Juan Gamboa, tells Borkon at least four other people on their witness list have gone quiet, “off our radar,” and the state believes Tesla’s lawyers got to them, with payments or by talking them out of showing up. Borkon didn’t rule, told the state to file a formal motion. That’s an allegation, not a finding, and Tesla hasn’t said a word publicly, but that’s what was said in that room.

Three months after California sued, back in May 2022, Elmo announced Tesla was building a “hardcore litigation department” reporting directly to him, and he promised Tesla would never settle an unjust case, then Tesla settled another racism suit in January and partly settled the Vaughn class action in July, about 580 workers still pressing individual claims, according to Electrek.

Let me tell you what’s behind the veil here, these racists like Elmo and all of the other pieces of shit aren’t really fighting for the societal freedom to say nigger, they are trying to normalize cruelty to Black people in society to get us back to the Jim Crow days.

That’s what weak men do, they’re too weak and bitch-made to ever do their own dirty work, so they take the coward’s approach and weaponize the public against those they hate.

It’s textbook, right now Elmo, AN IMMIGRANT is trying to use his company to further push that narrative.

And look at what “not on trial” is doing coming out of a Tesla lawyer’s mouth, because the word was never the case, the case is who got called it and by who and what happened to the person who reported it, Edwards written up, passed over, a hundred applications. The case is the state saying Black workers got put in the lowest-paying, least desirable jobs, got paid less, got passed over for promotions, got fired at higher rates, in a plant where the complaint counts about one HR person for every 604 to 740 employees.

That’s what’s NOT being said. The endearment routine is the shiny thing, hold it up, get the whole internet arguing about a word instead of a paycheck, a promotion, a write-up that landed on the wrong person’s file.

Argue about the word. Argue about the word. Argue about the word. While the pay data just sits there.

And yeah, immigrant, that’s not me being cute, that’s the record. Born in Pretoria in 1971, under apartheid, moves to Canada at seventeen, comes to the States in 1992 to study at Penn, works on J-1 and H-1B visas, becomes a citizen in 2002, that’s PolitiFact off Walter Isaacson’s biography, and now his company’s lawyers are in an Oakland courtroom fighting a case about how Black workers got treated in America.

The Nazi part, since I know somebody’s already typing. January 20, 2025, inauguration rally, Elmo slaps his chest, flings his arm up and out, says “my heart goes out to you,” does it again to the crowd behind him. Historians and lawmakers called it a Nazi salute, some right-wing extremists celebrated it online, Musk says it wasn’t one, and the ADL first called it “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.” Fine, call the arm thing whatever you want. Then Musk posted that “the radical leftists are really upset that they had to take time out of their busy day praising Hamas to call me a Nazi,” and a day later posted Nazi-themed puns the ADL turned around and condemned.

That’s the receipt.

And tanking, yeah, CNBC had Tesla’s stock taking its steepest drop of 2026 back in April on a bad deliveries report, then its worst day in nearly a year in July.

So what happens if Tesla loses.

Borkon’s the whole ballgame, no jury to hide behind, one judge who’s sat through the photographs, the testimony, and the Kim story, and California law doesn’t cap damages the way federal law does, Reuters has a loss running into the tens of millions. That’s the money, and honestly the money’s the small part. The state’s also asking for injunctive relief, court-ordered changes to how Tesla handles labor practices and workplace policies, and that’s the exact thing Jones went at in his opening, asking “what is there to enjoin?” and then answering himself, “nothing.”

Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.

A judge saying otherwise, on the record, after hearing all of it, is a court telling a company how to treat Black workers, and it lands next to the EEOC’s federal harassment suit from 2023, dozens of individual worker suits, and a history that already includes a jury handing a former elevator operator $137 million before a judge slashed it. Borkon ruled last year that those 6,000 workers couldn’t sue as a class, which was a win for Tesla, so this state case is the door that’s still open.

And if they win, watch how fast “the N-word is not on trial” gets picked up as a template by every company lawyer with a bad set of facts, because the tactic was never about the word. It’s about making cruelty sound like culture until nobody wants to be the one who calls it cruelty. Fuck these racist motherfuckers, and fuck that whole play.

Trial runs through October 30. Week one’s in the books, and the record already has photographs, a security manager’s testimony, and a lawyer on the phone for thirty minutes with a man who says he thought he was talking to the state.

Endearment my Black ass!

Written by Dr. Leo Croft Behavioral Scientist | Cultural Strategist | Member of the American Psychological Association

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