The distributor of the Dilbert comic strip announced it has dropped the strip after the creator Scott Adams’ racist tirade on YouTube last week. Newspapers across the country cancelled his comic strip citing his racism as abhorrent. (NPR, February 27, 2023, by Mandalit Del Barco)
Adams’ distributor said “…we will never support any commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.” In his tirade Adams used the statement “It’s OK to be white,” a phrase widely used in 2017 by white supremacists. Adams also called Blacks members of a “hate group” or “racist hate group.” (NBC News, February 25, 2023, by The Associated Press)
Eugene Robinson in The Washington Post, February 27, 2023, affirmed that Adams was within his First Amendment rights to advise whites to avoid Black people, and news outlets were equally within their rights to drop his strip. Robinson argues that there are deeper reasons to deprive Adams of his forum, referring to the far right wing notion, embraced by Adams, that Blacks are some kind of privileged class. ” That fantasy, says Robinson, “…is hallucinatory — and hilarious, at least to Black folks I know. But it is consequential, too, because it is one of the imagined wrongs that animate the MAGA political movement. There is a direct line between Adams’s rant and the MAGA effort to sanitize and distort the teaching of Black American history, because it is impossible to believe Black people are ‘the winning team’ and at the same time acknowledge the centuries-old fact pattern of slavery, Jim Crow segregation and systemic racism.”