‘A Black guy’ didn’t cause Boeing’s midair blowout. Capitalism did.

The murder of a pregnant Boston woman named Carol Stuart, shot in a car while riding home from a birthing class with her husband, still resonates loudly decades after it happened on the night of Oct. 23, 1989 — mainly for what that husband, Charles Stuart, told a 911 operator as he claimed the fatal bullet was fired in a failed carjacking.

A Black guy did it.

In a moment of national moral panic over urban crime and a crack epidemic, the accusation that a Black assailant had attacked a white couple sent shock waves through Boston’s predominantly African American and overpoliced neighborhoods such as Roxbury and Mission Hill, where — as Slate reported recently upon the release of a Max documentary series — as many as 150 men were stopped and frisked every day. One African American was arrested and another was named as a suspect before the real killer was identified. That was the victim’s husband, Charles Stuart, who jumped to his death in Massachusett’s Mystic River after his story unraveled.

But the spirit of “a Black guy did it” lived on long after Chuck Stuart. From Susan Smith, the white South Carolina woman who drove her two kids into a lake, to the Florida case of Crosley Green, a Black grandfather who was briefly freed by a judge who agreed his three decades behind bars was a racial hoax, white suspects have sought to use stereotypes about Black criminality to fool the public.

But the employment of this tired trope goes beyond crime and punishment, especially in an America soaking in an ugly backlash against a record of uneven progress on diversity in the six decades since the passage of the Civil Rights Act.

The latest shocking example of this occurred last week after one of the most troubling aviation incidents in the skies over America in the last 15 years: the midair explosion that blew out a door panel on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max jet at 14,000 feet, shortly after its takeoff from Portland, Ore. The pilots turned around and safely landed the aircraft despite harrowing minutes for the 171 passengers as misty cold air whipped through the cabin, ripping off one passenger’s shirt and sucking out another’s iPhone.

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The incident sparked robust conversation about air safety — a major software glitch had caused fatal Boeing 737 Max crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia in 2018-2019 — that took a bizarre turn when it reached the world’s richest man, Elon Musk, who burned $44 billion on taking over Twitter, renaming it X, and making it a platform for his increasingly conspiratorial views.

Musk gleefully joined in an X/Twitter discussion railing against stepped-up corporate initiatives for racial and gender diversity, equity, and inclusion, commonly known as DEI. The electric car guru responded favorably to a fact-free post — suggesting that pilots hired by United Airlines out of historically Black colleges have lower IQs than Air Force-trained pilots — that sounded like a eugenics rant from the 1920s, then added: “It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE.”

It’s not clear whether Musk misspelled DEI on purpose, but the next day the $231 billion man was back on the warpath, piling onto an attack on diversity initiatives at Boeing in a post that was viewed 14 million times: “Do you want to fly in an airplane where they prioritized DEI hiring over your safety? That is actually happening.”

This is actually not happening.

Musk is surfing atop a much bigger zeitgeist, in which — as the backlash to 2020’s George Floyd protests gets louder and louder — has declared DEI as the new right-wing boogeyman for 2024, replacing last year’s “critical race theory.” At Harvard, allegations of plagiarism became the MacGuffin for hedge-fund manager Bill Ackman — a white billionaire dude-bro cut from the same cloth as Musk — to oust president Claudine Gay, when his tweets revealed his real cause was blaming DEI for his alma mater hiring a Black woman he believed was unqualified. The Orwellian claim that DEI actually causes racism is now gaining volume on the Trump-flavored right wing.

Nowhere is this more absurd, though, than applying the DEI critique to Boeing’s airline safety issues, or to what happened aboard Alaska Airlines Flight 1282. The history of American aviation has been marred not by too much diversity but too little. Any push at United to employ qualified pilots who aren’t white men is long overdue at a company that didn’t hire its first Black pilot until after the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. The airline ultimately forked over $1 million in back pay under pressure from the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in 1976 and was sued again for discrimination in 2016 by 18 African American pilots who charged, among other things, that a secret cabal of white pilots called “The Vault” pushed back against diversity.

Ditto for Boeing, which refused to hire Black workers until 1942, and did so only after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House order barring discrimination by defense contractors and under pressure from civil rights lawyer, later the first Black U.S. Supreme Court justice, Thurgood Marshall. The DEI allegations by Musk seem especially ridiculous since the company policy cited on X/Twitter, about diversity and executive bonuses, came after the two 737 Max crashes. What’s more, although Alaska Airlines has shielded the identities of the Flight 1282 crew, air traffic tapes show at least one of the heroic copilots was a woman. In reality, the recent diversity push in American aviation comes during a remarkable stretch of 15 years without a fatal commercial crash on U.S. soil.

But then, you don’t need to be some kind of corporate Sherlock Holmes to sleuth out the real culprit at Boeing: the surrender of an engineering-driven, safety-oriented culture to one dominated by cost-cutting and a quarterly profit mentality aimed at boosting shareholder value above all else. Since the dawn of the 21st century, Boeing has been led by protégées and acolytes of the legendary and also notorious late GE boss Jack Welch, who pioneered the managerial philosophy of steering dollars toward investors and away from other stakeholders — including customers like the hapless souls who clung to their dear lives aboard Flight 1282.

The 346 people killed aboard Lion Air Flight 610 and Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302 were not so lucky. Despite Boeing’s initial attempt to blame the pilots, it soon became clear that an engineering flaw led to the twin crashes, and that shoddy practices and a penny-wise and pound-foolish decision to redesign its old 737s, instead of spending the $20 billion on designing a new class of jetliners from scratch, was largely to blame. And yet Boeing seems to have learned little from that fiasco.

After the Alaska Airlines door plug landed in an Oregon family’s backyard earlier this month, the Lever reported that the subcontractor that made the faulty part and had been spun off from Boeing, Spirit AeroSystems, is facing a federal lawsuit from former employees. They charge that cost-cutting, including major layoffs in 2020, triggered production problems, yet executives ignored their warnings of “an excessive amount of defects.”

Simply put, it wasn’t “a Black guy” — or a slew of Black guys, or women, or any other nonwhite hires — behind the new wave of airline safety concerns. It was the shortsightedness of late-stage capitalism. And capitalism’s obscene winners like Musk and Ackman have suddenly become economic Charles Stuarts, calling the modern 911 of social media to blame the financial crimes of their world on African American hiring.

It’s not just that college campuses in the age of DEI initiatives (despite a muddled record in actually making student bodies more diverse) have coincided with rising interest among millennials and Gen Z in socialism and in policies that might raise Musk and Ackman’s current low tax rates. It’s even more about status, and these billionaires’ fear that workplaces and universities that reflect America’s rich diversity might prove their success and power is less about the actually rigged meritocracy — the story they tell themselves in order to live — and more about inherited and stolen privilege. They are terrified that their cover story will unravel as suddenly as it did for Charles Stuart on a dark Boston night.

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