In case you missed it, Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, went on a YouTube rant that got his comic strip dropped from every single damn paper in the universe. How did it happen?
Scott Adams and Dilbert aside, that was ... some poll by Rasmussen.
Appreciate your apt takes on how it was more akin to trolling, than an attempt to usefully and actionably suss out race relations attitudes.
And yes, at least personally concurring that one can certainly appreciate art – including Adams' body of work of Dilbert cartoons – in its own right, separate from their artists and anything problematic about them within their own lives.
Adams did a superb job of spotlighting office workplace follies, in part through his own experiences and imagination and – IIRC from at least one past interview with him – also by riffing on suggestions sent by fans, from their experiences in their own workplaces.
I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. I think we all agree that we ought to at the societal level work to oppose all forms for racial hatred and intolerance. You can dismiss black hatred and intolerance for white people as nothing more than a few Hebrew Israelites on street corners, but if you did watch the interview with Hotep Jesus, he seemed to think that the Rasmussen poll however clumsily worded was roughly accurate in approximating the proportion of blacks who harbor those kinds of sentiments. That's a problem. It's an even bigger problem when you consider that blacks are easily the most violent racial group in a society characterized by relatively high levels of social violence as compared to past periods or other countries. And it's a public issue to the extent that blacks develop those sentiments because of messages they receive not in the home, but in school and from the media.
Scott Adams only admitted what the vast majority of white people actually do in practice. You cited the statistics for his home community of Danville . . . well, most white people live in places like that. In fact, they've done studies showing that the vast majority of white people will not live anywhere where blacks in the majority, which then in practice means that the majority of black people end up living in socially isolated ghettos. Are white people refusing to live around black people because they think too many black people harbor hatred and intolerance towards them? Maybe so, maybe no, but if you go back and look at social histories of white flight, the perception if not the reality of black violence towards white was a big factor.
I don't know the absolute truths here, how much black hatred and intolerance towards whites actually exists, how much that motivates interracial violence, and how much interracial violence motivates whites to make the choices they do, and how much those choices affect black lives, but what I do know is that the answer to those questions are not insignificant. Certainly Scott Adams guilty of bringing up this topic in an unnecessarily provocative way, and being a clearly intelligent individual, I'm not shedding any tears about any economic losses he may suffer as a result, but to present this as, "Scott Adams said something racist for no reason whatsoever other than that he is a racist, or at least a provocateur" is IMHO not accurate.
When you make broad generalizations about "blacks" and "whites" you are making a mistake. We do not have racial characteristics. The vast majority of all people of all races never hurt anyone. There were 25,000 murders last year. There are 330 million Americans. I have black friends. I live in a Hispanic neighborhood. One of my best friends lives in an entirely black neighborhood. Nobody is hurting or hating anyone.
You're smart enough to know the difference between anecdote and data and between trends and universals. Of course not every black or white person has any particular characteristic, nor does any particular trend exist with zero exceptions. By your logic we shouldn't worry about mass killings, or environmental accidents, or train crashes, or any a million other things that are considered problems but don't happen to everyone. Not defending him, but if you watched the interview with Hotep, he said very clearly that he still considered every individual person without prejudice.
Individuals don't have "racial characteristics" but races (defined as human populations sharing common ancestry) certainly do. Maybe it's a bad idea, but we count racial groups on our Census, and then collect a 1000 different statistics by race. Some races are wealthier, others poorer, some more educated, others less, some live mostly in the north and west, others in the southeast, etc., etc. The whole discussion about inequality and disparate outcomes only comes up because we keep those kinds of statistics, otherwise, how would we even know that inequality exists between the races? The fact that Kanye West lives in Calabasas and Cody doesn't thereby mean that a disproportionate number of black people aren't living in poverty.
The idea, as far as I understand it, is not that racial groups share no differentiating characteristics, but that those characteristics are not *inherent* to one's skin color. Poverty breeds violence. In mostly white areas with few to no black people, there is still crime, it is committed by white people, and, like the black people who commit violent crimes, those white criminals are very likely also in poverty. We're focusing on the wrong thing. It's not that black people disproportionately commit more violent crimes, it's that black people are so disproportionately poor, and poor people are more likely to be desperate enough to turn to antisocial violent crime.
It's a bit of a strawman to say that "characteristics are not *inherent* to one's skin color. The only thing that's *inherent* to skin color is relatively different levels of protection from UV radiation! The proper way to understand race IMHO is a group of people sharing common ancestry, and there aren't any behaviors that are inherent to such groups, but it can be said that there are behaviors that predominate more in some groups than others. In other words, groups of people who share common ancestry also tend to develop common cultures, and culture is just a word to describe population-level shared behaviors. Not every member of a given race needs to be exemplary of that race's culture in order for it to be true that said culture does exist.
The connection between poverty and crime is not 1:1. Internationally, it's not at all difficult to find places characterized by both high poverty and low crime rates. https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/violent-crime-rates-by-country/. Some of the countries according to the foregoing link with a lower crime rate than the U.S. include: Bolivia, Peru, Namibia, the Congo, and pretty much all of North Africa and South and Southeast Asia.
In the U.S., it's not that simple either, especially as it relates to violent crime. There a lots of poor rural areas all over the country that don't have anywhere near the violent crime that places like St. Louis and Detroit have. They do have other major problems like drug addiction, but violent crime is still rare in most of those places. Unfortunately, black people do commit disproportionately more violent crimes, even controlling for poverty, but it's not *inherent* to our skin color (people in low-crime countries in Africa obviously have darker skin than the average black American), but it's something that has evolved within our culture, here in America.
It does nobody any good to hand waive it away, as the primary victims of black violent crime are of course black people. And it's solvable, it's culture, and culture can and does change. It was actually solved to a large extent between the early 1990's and the early 2010's, but then we forgot everything we'd learned over that period, and now we're paying the price.
But the idea that you should stay away from people because of their skin color, which is what Adams said, is nonsense. Would I worry about a high crime neighborhood? Sure. But most black neighborhoods are not high crime. I had lunch at Juniors Cheesecake and most of the patrons were black. I did not worry about crime.
And the main reason Adams gave was because black people, as a group, were a hate group. That is both horrible and stupid.
Technically, he prefaced that with an "if this poll is accurate, then . . .", but yes, it was a horrible and stupid thing to say. There are two separate but related issues. Yes, there are high crime neighborhoods that otherwise innocent people regardless of race would do well to avoid, and they should avoid them not because of the race of the people who live there, but because the area is high crime. That said, he was addressing the question of maybe somewhere near half of black people not thinking that it was "OK to be white", and then saying , "if true . . .". Yes, it's probably true that the poll is inaccurate in that it's a dumb, loaded question that could illicit a negative response even from people who don't have a problem with white people. But black hostility towards white people does exist, notwithstanding the faultiness of the poll. If it is true that close to half of black people have a negative attitude towards white people (personally I sort of doubt it, but it's not zero), then it might make sense for white people to generally avoid black people, until proven otherwise in any individual case.
I think what a lot of people did miss from his comments was a little bit of hurt feelings. Judging just by the content on his podcast, he has over the year actually spent a fair amount of time and energy trying to figure out how to help with black/white relations, and the general problems facing black people as a whole. To wake up one day and contemplate that the people you're most trying to help actually hate you for your own skin color, I suspect he just flipped a little bit.
Now that I have read this, and not just twitter comments, I think it is pretty obvious that he was trolling. Lying and exaggerating to make a point. That seems to be his modus operandi. It gets kind of silly but I don't think he is racist.
He is reacting to things like blacks are taught not to deal with whites, I have been shocked to see high schools in Oregon tell the black kids they don't have to listen to teachers if they are white. No one seems to care about that.
Great article, I chortled- I groaned, I nodded along, occasionally I felt moments of despair at how easily people get played- then I made myself a cup of tea and acknowledged how little I miss Twitter drama but how much I miss all y’all!
I like Dilbert. Adams just goes out of his way to be an ass. A smug ass at that. No wonder he couldn't make it in a real workplace. Also, sounds like some racial resentment might have been brewing in the guy's mind for a while.
But most importantly, skip Hotep Jesus and instead rent "Bubba Hotep" in which Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis play Elvis and JFK, respectively, after winding up in a nursing home somewhere.
Good takes all-around. Actually discussed that Rasmussen poll in my Public Opinion class yesterday. It's honestly so bad that it was hardly worth discussing compared to more typical polls that are misleading in much subtler ways (e.g., no way 90% of Americans actually have a meaningful attitude on college student loan forgiveness policy).
For a long time, Scott Adams lived close by. Evidently, he moved to Danville, just down the road. He would lunch and have a glass at the same establishment I frequent on occasion. The owner is a friend, and like minded to Scott. He was known to the community. This is who he is. These are the conversations, amongst a large group of independent business owners, that happen in town every day. This is not an accident. Take him for his word. I’ve heard them first hand.
Fair. I wasn't being entirely serious (as partly Jewish!).
Scott Adams and Dilbert aside, that was ... some poll by Rasmussen.
Appreciate your apt takes on how it was more akin to trolling, than an attempt to usefully and actionably suss out race relations attitudes.
And yes, at least personally concurring that one can certainly appreciate art – including Adams' body of work of Dilbert cartoons – in its own right, separate from their artists and anything problematic about them within their own lives.
Adams did a superb job of spotlighting office workplace follies, in part through his own experiences and imagination and – IIRC from at least one past interview with him – also by riffing on suggestions sent by fans, from their experiences in their own workplaces.
Yeah, it was an awful poll. Their reaction post poll shows how much they were doing it as a troll.
I think this is a bit of an oversimplification. I think we all agree that we ought to at the societal level work to oppose all forms for racial hatred and intolerance. You can dismiss black hatred and intolerance for white people as nothing more than a few Hebrew Israelites on street corners, but if you did watch the interview with Hotep Jesus, he seemed to think that the Rasmussen poll however clumsily worded was roughly accurate in approximating the proportion of blacks who harbor those kinds of sentiments. That's a problem. It's an even bigger problem when you consider that blacks are easily the most violent racial group in a society characterized by relatively high levels of social violence as compared to past periods or other countries. And it's a public issue to the extent that blacks develop those sentiments because of messages they receive not in the home, but in school and from the media.
Scott Adams only admitted what the vast majority of white people actually do in practice. You cited the statistics for his home community of Danville . . . well, most white people live in places like that. In fact, they've done studies showing that the vast majority of white people will not live anywhere where blacks in the majority, which then in practice means that the majority of black people end up living in socially isolated ghettos. Are white people refusing to live around black people because they think too many black people harbor hatred and intolerance towards them? Maybe so, maybe no, but if you go back and look at social histories of white flight, the perception if not the reality of black violence towards white was a big factor.
I don't know the absolute truths here, how much black hatred and intolerance towards whites actually exists, how much that motivates interracial violence, and how much interracial violence motivates whites to make the choices they do, and how much those choices affect black lives, but what I do know is that the answer to those questions are not insignificant. Certainly Scott Adams guilty of bringing up this topic in an unnecessarily provocative way, and being a clearly intelligent individual, I'm not shedding any tears about any economic losses he may suffer as a result, but to present this as, "Scott Adams said something racist for no reason whatsoever other than that he is a racist, or at least a provocateur" is IMHO not accurate.
When you make broad generalizations about "blacks" and "whites" you are making a mistake. We do not have racial characteristics. The vast majority of all people of all races never hurt anyone. There were 25,000 murders last year. There are 330 million Americans. I have black friends. I live in a Hispanic neighborhood. One of my best friends lives in an entirely black neighborhood. Nobody is hurting or hating anyone.
You're smart enough to know the difference between anecdote and data and between trends and universals. Of course not every black or white person has any particular characteristic, nor does any particular trend exist with zero exceptions. By your logic we shouldn't worry about mass killings, or environmental accidents, or train crashes, or any a million other things that are considered problems but don't happen to everyone. Not defending him, but if you watched the interview with Hotep, he said very clearly that he still considered every individual person without prejudice.
Individuals don't have "racial characteristics" but races (defined as human populations sharing common ancestry) certainly do. Maybe it's a bad idea, but we count racial groups on our Census, and then collect a 1000 different statistics by race. Some races are wealthier, others poorer, some more educated, others less, some live mostly in the north and west, others in the southeast, etc., etc. The whole discussion about inequality and disparate outcomes only comes up because we keep those kinds of statistics, otherwise, how would we even know that inequality exists between the races? The fact that Kanye West lives in Calabasas and Cody doesn't thereby mean that a disproportionate number of black people aren't living in poverty.
The idea, as far as I understand it, is not that racial groups share no differentiating characteristics, but that those characteristics are not *inherent* to one's skin color. Poverty breeds violence. In mostly white areas with few to no black people, there is still crime, it is committed by white people, and, like the black people who commit violent crimes, those white criminals are very likely also in poverty. We're focusing on the wrong thing. It's not that black people disproportionately commit more violent crimes, it's that black people are so disproportionately poor, and poor people are more likely to be desperate enough to turn to antisocial violent crime.
It's a bit of a strawman to say that "characteristics are not *inherent* to one's skin color. The only thing that's *inherent* to skin color is relatively different levels of protection from UV radiation! The proper way to understand race IMHO is a group of people sharing common ancestry, and there aren't any behaviors that are inherent to such groups, but it can be said that there are behaviors that predominate more in some groups than others. In other words, groups of people who share common ancestry also tend to develop common cultures, and culture is just a word to describe population-level shared behaviors. Not every member of a given race needs to be exemplary of that race's culture in order for it to be true that said culture does exist.
The connection between poverty and crime is not 1:1. Internationally, it's not at all difficult to find places characterized by both high poverty and low crime rates. https://wisevoter.com/country-rankings/violent-crime-rates-by-country/. Some of the countries according to the foregoing link with a lower crime rate than the U.S. include: Bolivia, Peru, Namibia, the Congo, and pretty much all of North Africa and South and Southeast Asia.
In the U.S., it's not that simple either, especially as it relates to violent crime. There a lots of poor rural areas all over the country that don't have anywhere near the violent crime that places like St. Louis and Detroit have. They do have other major problems like drug addiction, but violent crime is still rare in most of those places. Unfortunately, black people do commit disproportionately more violent crimes, even controlling for poverty, but it's not *inherent* to our skin color (people in low-crime countries in Africa obviously have darker skin than the average black American), but it's something that has evolved within our culture, here in America.
It does nobody any good to hand waive it away, as the primary victims of black violent crime are of course black people. And it's solvable, it's culture, and culture can and does change. It was actually solved to a large extent between the early 1990's and the early 2010's, but then we forgot everything we'd learned over that period, and now we're paying the price.
But the idea that you should stay away from people because of their skin color, which is what Adams said, is nonsense. Would I worry about a high crime neighborhood? Sure. But most black neighborhoods are not high crime. I had lunch at Juniors Cheesecake and most of the patrons were black. I did not worry about crime.
And the main reason Adams gave was because black people, as a group, were a hate group. That is both horrible and stupid.
Technically, he prefaced that with an "if this poll is accurate, then . . .", but yes, it was a horrible and stupid thing to say. There are two separate but related issues. Yes, there are high crime neighborhoods that otherwise innocent people regardless of race would do well to avoid, and they should avoid them not because of the race of the people who live there, but because the area is high crime. That said, he was addressing the question of maybe somewhere near half of black people not thinking that it was "OK to be white", and then saying , "if true . . .". Yes, it's probably true that the poll is inaccurate in that it's a dumb, loaded question that could illicit a negative response even from people who don't have a problem with white people. But black hostility towards white people does exist, notwithstanding the faultiness of the poll. If it is true that close to half of black people have a negative attitude towards white people (personally I sort of doubt it, but it's not zero), then it might make sense for white people to generally avoid black people, until proven otherwise in any individual case.
I think what a lot of people did miss from his comments was a little bit of hurt feelings. Judging just by the content on his podcast, he has over the year actually spent a fair amount of time and energy trying to figure out how to help with black/white relations, and the general problems facing black people as a whole. To wake up one day and contemplate that the people you're most trying to help actually hate you for your own skin color, I suspect he just flipped a little bit.
Now that I have read this, and not just twitter comments, I think it is pretty obvious that he was trolling. Lying and exaggerating to make a point. That seems to be his modus operandi. It gets kind of silly but I don't think he is racist.
He is reacting to things like blacks are taught not to deal with whites, I have been shocked to see high schools in Oregon tell the black kids they don't have to listen to teachers if they are white. No one seems to care about that.
Great article, I chortled- I groaned, I nodded along, occasionally I felt moments of despair at how easily people get played- then I made myself a cup of tea and acknowledged how little I miss Twitter drama but how much I miss all y’all!
Elsa!!! We miss you too!!!
I like Dilbert. Adams just goes out of his way to be an ass. A smug ass at that. No wonder he couldn't make it in a real workplace. Also, sounds like some racial resentment might have been brewing in the guy's mind for a while.
But most importantly, skip Hotep Jesus and instead rent "Bubba Hotep" in which Bruce Campbell and Ossie Davis play Elvis and JFK, respectively, after winding up in a nursing home somewhere.
I really need to. I love Bruce Campbell.
Not surprised in the least.
A wacko movie.
I have one quibble, it's the "Cleveland Plain Dealer", not Dealer
Thank you! Fixed.
Good takes all-around. Actually discussed that Rasmussen poll in my Public Opinion class yesterday. It's honestly so bad that it was hardly worth discussing compared to more typical polls that are misleading in much subtler ways (e.g., no way 90% of Americans actually have a meaningful attitude on college student loan forgiveness policy).
For a long time, Scott Adams lived close by. Evidently, he moved to Danville, just down the road. He would lunch and have a glass at the same establishment I frequent on occasion. The owner is a friend, and like minded to Scott. He was known to the community. This is who he is. These are the conversations, amongst a large group of independent business owners, that happen in town every day. This is not an accident. Take him for his word. I’ve heard them first hand.