Scott Adams cancelled for being "racist"

Actually, for overreacting to evidence of black racism

Scott Adams’ massively popular cartoon strip “Dilbert” has been cancelled due to what critics call his “racist rant.” “Dilbert” is being dropped by, among other outlets, the Washington Post, USA Today’s network of hundreds of papers, the Los Angeles Times, and the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Adams says that by tomorrow (Monday), the number of papers carrying his work will be “around zero.”

The cancellation stems from comments Adams made in reaction to a poll. The poll question was: “Is it okay to be white?” Only 53 percent of blacks who were surveyed said it is. 26 percent said it isn’t. The rest weren’t sure.

At one level the question posed in the poll is silly — like asking whether it’s okay to be right-handed. But I understand why Rasmussen asked it. Apparently, certain groups came up with the slogan “it’s okay to be white.” The survey might have been designed, among other possible purposes, to shed light on whether the statement is controversial.

Some light was shed. It’s significant that only about one-half of blacks said it’s okay to be white and about one-quarter of blacks said it isn’t. If the poll’s methodology is sound and if the responses were honest, it shows a considerable amount of racism among black Americans.

Few — and certainly none of the outlets that cancelled Adams — would fail to infer widespread white racism from a poll in which only half of white respondents agreed that it’s okay to be black. There’s no reason not infer widespread black racism from the corresponding result of the Rasmussen poll.

Adams made this inference, but went further. He stated, “If nearly half of all Blacks are not okay with White people...that's a hate group.” He added that, under these circumstances, white people should "get the hell away from Black people."

It’s understandable that Adams was upset by the result of the poll. However, I believe he overreacted to it.

First, since the question posed is kind of silly, I’m not sure we should take the results quite as seriously as Adams did. Second, more than half of the black respondents did not evince any hatred towards whites. Thus it seems unfair — or sloppy at a minimum — to call black Americans a hate group.

What about the statement that white people should get away from black people? If it’s really true that almost half of blacks can’t say it’s okay to be white, then I can understand why Adams would think it unwise for whites to associate closely with black people they don’t know.

But most of us know blacks who — a like a majority of their brothers and sisters — are fine with whites. We shouldn’t “get the hell away” from them.

Nor is it clear that why, as a rule, one should get away from blacks whose attitude towards whites we don’t know. In many (but not all) contexts, it seems wiser to wait until hostility is shown before withdrawing.

In my opinion, then, what we have with Adams is a guy who looked at a disturbing poll result and went a little too far with his commentary about it. To me, that’s a fairer description than to accuse him of “a racist rant” — which is the headline used nearly in unison by most of the outlets I’ve seen comment on the matter.

Should Adams be cancelled for what he said? I don’t think so. Overreacting to a disturbing poll ought not be a hanging offense.

And I doubt it would have been in this case were Adams not a conservative with pro-Trump sympathies. I’m almost certain, moreover, that Adams wouldn’t have been cancelled by any mainstream organ if he were black and had riffed this way about comparable poll responses from whites about blacks (not that whites would respond like the blacks in this poll did).

Adams can’t have been surprised by his cancellation, though. Surely, he’s sophisticated enough to know the rules of the game these days.

Newspapers are free to carry whichever cartoon strips they please. In a better world, they would make these decisions without regard to the political and ideological utterances of the cartoonists, except in cases that, unlike this one, are indisputably extreme.

Unfortunately, that’s not the world of today.