Another Very Heimische Zalman Bernstein TGIF (3): The BOOKATEEs Love White Supremacist Dilbert! (3/10)
David Shasha
Is It OK to Be Scott Adams?
By: Glenn Loury
Why was Scott Adams canceled? The story that’s being spun out in the media is that Adams, the Dilbert cartoonist and author, went on a racist tirade in which he referred to African Americans as a “hate group” and urged white people to “get the hell away” from black people. This, the story goes, is a call for segregation, a clear indicator that Adams harbors anti-black beliefs and as such cannot be allowed to remain a part of polite society. Accordingly, his long-running comic strip must be dropped, his book deals must be voided, and he must be prevented from contaminating the culture with his noxious views.
But you could tell another story. Shocking as his statement is, it gives voice to a sentiment harbored by many, many other white people who feel similarly about African Americans as a group. Clearly, some white people feel there are reasons to “get the hell away” from black people. They don’t say it in words; they say it when they choose to move away from cities and neighborhoods where a high proportion of crimes are committed by black assailants. You can cancel as many comic strips as you want, but it’s not going to prevent white people who no longer want to live near predominately black neighborhoods from acting in what they see as their own best interests. All it will do is prevent all of us from talking about the larger forces that made Adams’s statements a cause for panic.
Abstract beliefs about race don’t make people uproot their lives, sell their houses, move to new neighborhoods, and find new schools for their kids. Material incentives do. Whacking down every outré statement made by a white person about a black person may serve the cause of “anti-racism,” but it won’t put an end to the underlying incentives that cause groups to segregate themselves. If we’re unable to discuss those incentives openly, we’ll hardly notice when more and more people start taking Scott Adams’s advice.
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GLENN LOURY: We still got Scott Adams to discuss, the cartoonist, the Dilbert creator who has been canceled. His publisher of his forthcoming book has dropped the book. I mean, his agent has dropped the agency relationship. The newspapers like the Washington Post and the LA Times and others, USA Today and others that carry his strip have decided to drop the strip.
Why? Let me see if I recall. Because he saw the results of a poll, I think Rasmussen, that asked the question, “Is it okay to be white?,” to which like 47% of the black respondents said either, no, it's not okay or they weren't sure that it was okay to be white. He characterized African Americans en masse as a hate group and said that he had once tried to be nice and be a part of the “help black people” brigade, but he has since decided that he was going to get as far away from black people and have as little to do with them as possible. And he recommended that—this is a paraphrase, not a quote—other white people as well get away from black people. What's your commentary on this whole brouhaha.
JOHN MCWHORTER: I'm gonna be very honest. I'm an armchair person, I'm a Montessori-trained nerd, and I don't know much about money and business. The idea here seems to be that all of those entities need to cut their ties with Adams, because it would be bad for business to be associated with somebody who has expressed racist views, to the extent that he's basically saying, “Screw these people's concerns,” and essentially saying, “I don't like them,” and he's applying it to a group.
Yes, this is racism. The case here is not whether or not he has said something racist. Or I don't think it's a very interesting discussion. But the idea is that every newspaper has to drop him because it'd be bad for business. Is it that they fear that a significant number of subscribers would drop the paper if they continue to see Dilbert in it? Is that the idea? Or is it that they feel that as moral representatives in society, they have to cut ties with Adams? Is it money or is it morals? And I guess the answer is both.
Well, okay. I think it's money. I think the money turns on what is assumed about the morals of the person who doesn't drop [Dilbert]. I think once this thing gets going, there's a sanction movement that gets going, your decision to join it or not join it becomes a statement about whether or not you affirm the value that the movement is meant to express, in this case, anti-racism. He said some things that are arguably racist. They're mild compared to a lot of things that are said about white people on a daily basis by black people.
But whites are empowered, right?
Yeah. I don't wanna parse the question of what is and isn't racist. I'll stipulate that it's racist. For many people, it's racist. That's not what I think is important.
Once papers start dropping, the question of why did you not drop him becomes one that a lot of organizations don't want to have to answer. And the reason is money. The reason is they'll lose readership. They'll weaken their position in the marketplace. I don't think corporations have morals. They say “our institutional values.” Okay. Whatever. It's all made up.
I think the canceling response to a disquieting intervention, such as Scott Adams's intervention, was, “Oh, that's what he thinks about black people. I wonder how many white people think that about black people. ‘Get as far away from them as you can.’ Oh, wow. That's promoting segregation.” Charles Blow makes a big deal out of this resegregation of America point. That's supposed to be anti-black. I think a lot of people think it.
Oh yeah.
That's why it becomes all the more important to cancel him. There's a thing that's trying to get out, and they're trying to keep the lid on it. They're trying to prevent it from breaking free. And that's why I so lament the racialization of the the crime and policing discussion. Because I think it has a dark side as well as this supposedly progressive side. They make a big deal out of the fact that it's a white police officer who abuses a black citizen. The dark side is that there are black criminals who are preying on white people on a daily basis. Lots of 'em.
Why would you get away from Chicago or Baltimore or certain parts of Atlanta or St. Louis or New Orleans, Detroit? Why? Why would you not want to live in that city? Because black criminals make living there dangerous, period. Carjackers, robbers, rapists, murderers. That's the ugly, dark side of a racialized discourse about crime, punishment, and policing in this country. The flip side of “mass incarceration is racist” is that too many black people are breaking the law. That's the unspeakable, terrifying specter that haunts comments such as those that Scott Adams made, and it's the reason why he must be canceled. Because otherwise we'd have to actually contemplate and deal with the fact that there's a real motivation. Not his bad, racist morality, like he's some kind of witch. He's a tip of an iceberg. You'd rather cancel him than actually talk about what he's talking about.
All of that is true. There's a part of me that can't completely wrap my head around this idea that you know people are thinking it, but they're not supposed to say it. I guess the idea is if they say it, it'll encourage more people to say it, and it'll also encourage more people to think it, I guess. And so you want to keep a lid on this.
Adams is responding to the idea that practically half of black people apparently think it's not okay to be white. And I think in this, he's kind of willfully disregarding a certain aspect of nuance. First of all, that there are power relations involved. Second, you can say that without meaning that you're gonna actively oppose white people or get in their way or try to hurt them. It's a philosophical position about what we call whiteness today. And there's also a history of that whole issue of “Is it okay to be white?” that he's completely ignoring. It's a set phrase. I don't know what was going through his head. I mean, talk about the livelihood he lost. We can assume that he's a millionaire many times over, and so he's not putting himself in any kind of danger. He clearly just tipped and decided to say something honest, is the idea.
They're trying to ward off a race war? Are they afraid that less temperate people than him are gonna rise up and start doing Dylann Roof type things? Maybe that makes a certain kind of sense, but I don't think that's what people are thinking. What people are thinking is: “This is wrong. We don't do this. He must be excommunicated.” A part of me feels like, are we that delicate? And I'm thinking, well, somebody would say, “You have to think about what happened in Buffalo at the supermarket.”
But I'm not sure that's what people are thinking. They're thinking about our feelings. And I don't know if I want to be catered to that extent. So we can't read his comic strip anymore because he said something that hurts our feelings. I don't quite get it. I think Dilbert is funny. I've got a few Dilbert books. I used to read Dilbert every day. I used to read Dilbert in a couple of other languages to keep my languages in trim, because it's clever language.
I'm not gonna abjure Dilbert. I don't care how the person who draws it and scripts it feels about black people. I can separate those two things. The strip has nothing to do with race. Or apparently the characters made some comments about reparations or something at some point. I missed those. I don't read the strip anymore. But I don't care. This is the whole issue about the artist versus the creation. I haven't written about this and I'm not going to, because I think we all have bigger fish to fry. But are we so delicate? That was my first thought.
From author Substack page, March 7, 2023
Scott Adams and the right-wing insistence on White victimhood
By: Philip Bump
For months it has seemed inevitable that the “Dilbert” comic strip’s run as a popular American newspaper cartoon would end precisely as it did: a victim of controversy triggered by its creator, Scott Adams. In retrospect, even the specific catalyst seems as if it could have been predicted. Adams’s increasing espousal of right-wing racial politics — and his embrace of the or-am-I-just-joking mode of online boundary-pushing — led him to declare in a video last week that he viewed Black Americans as a “hate group.”
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people … that’s a hate group,” Adams said, citing polling from Rasmussen Reports. “I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to White people is to get the hell away from Black people … because there is no fixing this.”
And that was that. Syndicators of “Dilbert” dropped the strip, as did individual newspapers. The cartoon will no longer appear in The Washington Post, among other news outlets. The damage was done.
Adams himself has at times predicted his own “cancellation,” his ostracization for making controversial or repugnant claims. This is itself a common tactic on the right, people amplifying their supposed anti-left credentials by suggesting their views are unacceptably politically incorrect. Often, the controversy fails to materialize or, at least, to reach the scale that Adams achieved over the past week. But it’s the thought that counts.
Tracking Adams’s evolution alongside the online right is fascinating. He supported Donald Trump’s efforts to goad the left, if not every aspect of his presidency. In the past few years, his politics have been more Tucker-Carlson-ish, rejecting government and other institutions as hobbled, moronic or nefarious. Adams enjoys presenting himself as smarter and more clever than everyone else, leading him to couch controversial statements with belated winks in the manner of Twitter owner Elon Musk (who rushed to support Adams in the wake of the new controversy).
What makes the situation with Adams interesting, though, isn’t that it’s unique. Quite the opposite. He (like Trump and Musk) has been able to tread further into controversy thanks to celebrity and power. Years of pushing boundaries only to see them stretch to accommodate him (as with the introduction of the first Black Dilbert character last year — who, true to Adams’s worldview, identified as White) simply reinforced his own self-confidence and led him to push harder.
There are rewards for this on the right. Donald Trump Jr. has gone from minding a real estate empire to creating a lib-baiting one. You can get attention and praise and go viral online with successfully structured efforts to make Democrats mad. By offering evidence that the political right is correct and the political left toxic and deluded, you can generate attention capital, one of the most important currencies in right-wing politics.
Which brings us to Rasmussen Reports.
Like Adams, Rasmussen has spent the post-Trump years fervently engaged in culture-war fights. The company, once generally considered conservative but still primarily a polling firm, has shifted its focus. Its online presence includes the results of its Republican-friendly polls, but also amplifies right-wing causes and rhetoric. In the wake of the 2020 election, it shared misinformation about fraud and backed Trump’s efforts to reject electors. In recent months, it has boosted anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. Its polls, meanwhile, are often sponsored by hard-right organizations and causes.
So, earlier this month, it embraced a different aspect of right-wing politics: the idea that White people face discrimination and racism equal to or greater than Black or other non-White groups.
This has been a central motivator on the right for well over a decade. Trump’s election in 2016 was powered in no small degree by Republican primary voters concerned about the status of White Americans. This sense was heightened by the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement and the immigration surge that occurred in 2014. The idea was clearly a central part of opposition to the presidency of Barack Obama as well, both because he was not White and because his election overlapped with increased concern about the perceived demographic decline of Whites. Polling has shown that Republicans consistently express the belief that White Americans are as likely to face discrimination as other racial groups, if not more.
Rasmussen, looking to leverage that idea, published the results of a poll on Twitter.
BLACK AMERICANS ONLY:
"It's okay to be white."
53% agree, 26% disagree, 21% not sure
As summarized, it suggests that only 53 percent of Black Americans agree that “it’s okay to be White.” Hence Adams’s framing: “nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people.”
By itself, though, this is wrong. Only 26 percent say that they “disagree,” according to the tweet. But remember that these figures are for only a small number of Black poll respondents. If Rasmussen’s 1,000-person poll included 136 Black adults (matching the national population) the margin of error here would likely be about 8 percentage points. (This isn’t really how polling works, but Rasmussen’s methodology is dubious enough anyway that we’ll just use it as our example.)
More importantly, though, Rasmussen didn’t ask if people thought it was okay to be White. They asked if people agreed with the statement, “It’s okay to be White.”
Why is this important? Consider another, even more loaded question: Do you agree with the statement “all lives matter"? No one cognizant of American politics in the last decade would not recognize that statement for what it is. It’s not a comment about whether lives matter; it’s a rebuttal to the activist phrase “Black lives matter.” It’s not about all lives, it’s about the Black Lives Matter movement.
“It’s okay to be White” involves a similarly loaded, if less broadly recognized, context. After the phrase first emerged from 4chan, a site on which trolling is celebrated, Carlson defended it, characteristically suggesting that the racial division was being fomented by those who understood the troll as a troll.
“It’s a sort of rhetorical judo flip that works by willfully misinterpreting critiques of structural white supremacy or racism as an attack on the mere fact of being caucasian,” writer Julian Sanchez observed on Twitter. “And then stage 2 of the judo flip — which is the real point of the whole maneuver — is that when someone who understands what’s going on takes exception, the troll gets to gasp in horror to anyone who doesn’t get what’s up ‘Oh, so you think it’s NOT OK to be white?’ ”
Not everyone would immediately recognize the ploy here, including, presumably, many Black respondents who took the question at face value. Many, it is safe to assume, spotted it immediately. Rasmussen certainly should have, given that they were asking about it. Rasmussen should also, therefore, recognize that its presentation of the question and the responses strains a generous assumption of good faith.
Adams, like many on the right, was happy to seize upon this “data point” as validating his assumptions about race in general and Black people specifically. You don’t simply jump from one poll about the views of Black Americans to a position of “I endorse avoiding Black people at all cost.” This is a position that is already in your immediate vicinity if all it takes to be nudged across the boundary is one misleading poll question from a partisan pollster.
That Adams was in that vicinity was obvious from his various past comments. That Musk quickly rose to his defense, casting the media as racist, was predictable: He’s mired in the same politics and the same approach to politics as Adams.
The result is a trap that many others, particularly on the right, have fallen into over the past decade. Immersed in an echo chamber where Whites are the victims, they make public assertions that reflect that position. And when the inevitable happens, when the assertions trigger a backlash, the echo chamber only grows louder: Here’s another White man, punished for his views.
Outside of the echo chamber, the view is different. The guy from Dilbert, huh? Sounds about right.
From The Washington Post, February 27, 2023