So long, Dilbert
Scott Adams made his fortune with his wit and artisanship.
He’s losing that fortune with his mouth.
He’d built that fortune on the shoulders of his highly popular comic strip – Dilbert.
Adams has slowly been chipping away at the goodwill Dilbert helped him build with the public (2,000 newspapers around the world) with his rather exotic takes on things.
He once compared women asking for equal pay to children demanding candy.
Then, last September, he decided to take on corporate governance. He developed a plot line where a Black character would “identify as white.” That wasn’t quite enough for that character’s management. They wanted the Black man (“identifying as white”) to also “identify as gay.”
A total of 77 newspapers pulled Dilbert from their pages for that particular foray into the ever-provocative (and I’d call curmudgeonly) mind of Scott Adams.
Recently, he earned a flood of hostility, with his bizarre take on a rather meaningless set of poll questions asked by the right-leaning pollster – Rasmussen.
A total of 1,000 people were presented with the sentence, “It’s OK to be white.”
Keep in mind, of the 1,000 people responding to that sentence, only 13% were Black (130 people). And of those 130 Black people, 47% said they don’t think it’s OK to be white. That’s 61 people. The rest (53%) agreed with the statement that “It’s OK to be white.”
What a mess!
No wonder the world is scratching its entire head (a thought never before the subject of any speculation) as to why Adams drew the conclusions he drew from such a curious poll.
First, as of 2020, there are 41.6 million Black people in the United States. Adams responded to something just 61 (or fewer) of them said.
Second, what would happen if Rasmussen presented a group of white people with the phrase – “It’s OK to be Black?”
Adams took to YouTube to say, “I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America, to try to help Black citizens anymore. So, I’m going to, I’m going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn’t seem like it pays off,” Adams said with such matter-of-fact certainty, it was as if he’d been practicing those lines – like it was “angertainment!”
He was far from finished. “If, you know, nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people, according to this poll. Not according to me. According to this poll. That’s a hate group. That’s a hate group. And I don’t want to have anything to do with them,” Adams said.
If a fraction, of a fraction, of a fraction, of a fraction of anything, presents itself as a conclusion for you to draw, don’t draw that conclusion.
Adams has lost newspapers, and upcoming books – even Dilbert’s syndicator has bid him farewell.
His only defender has been Elon Musk, who seems to willingly invite derision these days. Since he’s taken over Twitter, Musk sees himself as a, well, I don’t know what he sees himself as.
“The media is racist. For a very long time, U.S. media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites and Asians,” wrote Twitter’s chief tweeter Musk.
It’s no small task causing your empire to crumble with just a few words or poorly reasoned sentences.
Adams is probably well off enough that he’s set for life. I’m certainly not going to worry about how he’ll avoid the hate from that supposed “hate group,” – Black folks.
I’ve been wondering how to declare my freedom from people I don’t want to associate with, even though I’ve never associated with them in the first place.
OK! I’m going to stay away from Girl Scouts.
With their funny hats and their scrumptious Caramel DeLites – (previously Samoas cookies) – they’re a, well, A HATE GROUP!
Or is that a hat group?
Whatever.
They’re not like us.
So, I plan to steer clear of them after they deliver my Caramel DeLites – next year, or the year after.
Edward A. Owens is a multi-Emmy Award winner, former reporter, and anchor for Entertainment Tonight, and 50-year TV news and newspaper veteran. E-mail him at freedoms@bellatlantic.net.