Hundreds of US newspapers drop Dilbert: Cartoonist Scott Adams’ racist comments, and his past controversies

Adams had last week said White people should “get the hell away from Black people” and that he didn’t think “it makes any sense as a White citizen of America to try to help Black citizens any more”. Why did Adams go on the racist rant and what has the fallout been so far?

What did Scott Adams say?

On February 22, on his YouTube livestream show ‘Real Coffee with Scott Adams’, the 65-year-old cartoonist talked about an opinion poll by a conservative firm called Rasmussen Reports. The poll suggested that 26 per cent of Black respondents disagreed with the statement “It’s OK to be White”, while 21 per cent were “not sure”.

Adams said the respondents were a “hate group”.

“It turns out that nearly half of that team doesn’t think I’m okay to be White,” Adams said, as reported by NPR. “I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off. I get called a racist. That’s the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you’re White. It’s over. Don’t even think it’s worth trying,” he said. “I’m not saying start a war or do anything bad,” he further said.

“Nothing like that. I’m just saying get away. Just get away.”

Before that, Adams, who is White, had said he had been “identifying as Black”, “because I like to be on the winning team,” NPR reported.

The ‘It’s OK to be White’ slogan

“It’s OK to be White” as a slogan has been used by White supremacists. The Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish NGO based in the US that works against hate crimes, has categorised ‘It’s OK to be White’ as a hate slogan.

“The phrase “It’s Okay To Be White” is a slogan popularised in late 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the controversial discussion forum 4chan. The original idea behind the campaign was to choose an ostensibly innocuous and inoffensive slogan, put that slogan on fliers bereft of any other words or imagery, then place the fliers in public locations. Originators assumed that “liberals” would react negatively to such fliers and condemn them or take them down, thus “proving” that liberals did not even think it was “okay” to be white,” ADL’s website says.

The website goes on to add that while it is not clear whether the trollers were White supremacists, “actual white supremacists quickly began to promote the campaign”, as they had “themselves used the phrase in the past—including on fliers—long before the 4chan campaign originated”.

Fall-out of Adams’ comments

Adams’ comic strip Dilbert, which features a man and a talking dog and mocks corporate office culture, has been immensely popular.

By February 26, hundreds of newspapers, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, the USA Today network (which publishes over 200 newspapers), The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe and The San Antonio Express-News, had all cut ties with Adams.

Adams himself has been posting tweet after tweet defending his remarks and claiming they are being seen out of context. On YouTube, he said, “By Monday, I should be mostly canceled. So most of my income will be gone by next week… My reputation for the rest of my life is destroyed. You can’t come back from this,” Reuters reported.

Past controversies involving Scott Adams

This is not the first time Adams has been criticised for his statements.

Last year, as reported by The Guardian, he introduced a Black character to Dilbert. Called Dave the Black Engineer, the character was used to ridicule workplace diversity and transgender identity.

In January 2022, he tweeted, “I’m going to self-identify as a Black woman until Biden picks his Supreme Court nominee. I realize it’s a long shot, but I don’t want to completely take myself out of the conversation for the job.”

In June 2020, he claimed he lost out on work for being White. “I lost my TV show for being white when UPN decided it would focus on an African-American audience. That was the third job I lost for being white. The other two in corporate America. (They told me directly.),” he tweeted.

In 2019, he was at the centre of a row after he seemed to use the Gilroy Garlic Festival shooting to promote his online interface platform. “If you were a witness to the #GilroyGarlicFestivalshooting please sign on to Interface by WhenHub (free app) and you can set your price to take calls. Use keyword Gilroy,” he tweeted.

When criticised for using a tragedy to make money, Adams said he regretted the “set your price” phrase, but would not delete the tweet because that is “cowardice”, the NYT reported.

He has claimed he admires former US President Donald Trump’s communication style. “One of the things that you can learn from Trump’s approach is that energy is more important than being technically correct,” the NYT reported him as saying in 2019.

“He is more persuasive than any public figure I’ve ever seen,” Adams, a trained hypnotist, had said. “Early on in 2015 I saw his skill set and thought no one has that skill set. You can’t recognise persuasion unless you’ve studied it.”