Dilbert comic creator Scott Adams has been accused of going on a racist rant. As a result, his popular comic strip has been dropped from numerous media outlets where it ran. (The Cleveland Plain Dealer‘s editor responded that “we will no longer carry [Scott Adams’] comic strip in The Plain Dealer. This is not a difficult decision.”)
Adams’s own congressional representative ripped the artist as a “snowflake.”
But Adams insists that people are missing crucial details that give what he said context — especially the 53% figure he was given. Adams’s controversial remarks — saying that White people should “get the hell away from Black people” and using the term “hate group” — were in response to that specific prompt, Adams says.
Elon Musk doesn’t seem to understand what’s the problem with Scott Adam’s racist rant.
— Bishop Talbert Swan (@TalbertSwan) February 27, 2023
After all, being segregated from Black people is the way his peeps in apartheid South Africa rolled anyway 🤷🏾 pic.twitter.com/fMLALAmkqH
Adams said he’s been helping Black people “all my life” but the “only outcome is I get called a racist. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re White.”
Who is calling Adams a racist? (Or, rather, who was calling him a racist before this video?)
Here’s the prompt Adams wants people to know he was responding to. Adams was presented with results of a poll that contended that “53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement, ‘It’s OK to be White’.”
Adams did some math and evidently concluded that this could mean 47% of those polled thought the opposite — that it was not ‘Ok to be White’. (See Rasmussen Media for polls.)
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people — according to this poll, not according to me, according to this poll,” Adams said, “that’s a hate group.”
Notably, Adams twice stressed that he was responding to the poll, drawing his conclusions from its conclusions. He even began his statement with an “if” — so Adams’s commentary is presented as part of an if/then calculation, though there is little indication he harbors any doubt about the premise presented.
That was enough of an explanation to snag support from Elon Musk. Musk tweeted that “the media is racist.”
[Note: The Anti Defamation League defines a hate group as “An organization whose goals and activities are primarily or substantially based on a shared antipathy towards people of one or more other different races, religions, ethnicities/nationalities/national origins, genders, and/or sexual identities. The mere presence of bigoted members in a group or organization is typically not enough to qualify it as a hate group; the group itself must have some hate-based orientation/purpose.”]
