Many US newspapers have recently announced their decision of dropping Dilbert comics after its creator Scott Adams made some racist comments against black people in a Youtube video.
What Happened?
On 22nd February, Adams, in that video, starts the episode by discussing the recent presidential bid by Republican multimillionaire entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy. A little while into the video , he started to give his opinions on the the poll conducted by an conservative organisation, also known as the ‘Rasmussen Report’ where 56% of Black respondents said that they agreed with the statement, 26% disagreed with the statement which said “It’s OK to be white”. Adams dubbed the group who disagreed with the statement as a ‘hate group’ .He also proceeded to comment that Black Americans were a ‘hate group’ and went on to urge and advise White people to ‘get the hell away’ from the ‘hate group’.
Adams stated that after these comments, he knew that he would likely be the face of an outrage, or he would be “cancelled” and as a result, most of his income would be gone by next week. He also added that due to these comments, his reputation for the rest of his life would likely be destroyed and it would be extremely difficult for him to recover from this controversy.
These sort of racist comments are not the first made by Adams. In 2022, Adams introduced the first Black character in his comics. The character was named ‘Dave the Black Engineer’, who was exclusively used to make fun of the lack of workplace diversity and transgender identity. Moreover the character identifies as white, another way Adams’s racist sense of humour comes to life. The introduction of this character led to The San Francisco Chronicle and 76 other newspapers, which were managed and published by Lee Enterprises, had reportedly dropped Dilbert.
In the past as well, he has claimed that multiple times his project has been cancelled due to the fact that he is White. In June of 2020, he claimed that the reason behind the cancellation of the Dilbert animated TV series 20 years was because he was white and went on to state that it was “the third job I lost for being white”. He had been a vocal supporter of Donald Trump.
Some of the popular newspapers that have already announced that they will discontinue the publication of the comics include The Boston Globe, the Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post. Gannett, the largest American newspaper publisher, which owns more than 300 local media outlets in 43 states, has announced that they too, would immediately stop publishing Dilbert.
The editor of the newspaper ‘The Plain Dealer’, Chris Quinn, commented that it ‘was not a difficult decision’ for his paper to discontinue to support this comics as their paper is not a home for racist people like that of Scott Adams.
Dilbert’s history
Dilbert, which was responsible for Adam’s fame and recognition as a gifted cartoonist, was first published in April 1989, with an aim to mock the American Offices through the white-collar, micromanaged office with engineer Dilbert as the title character. Dilbert has appeared in 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and 25 languages.
Shortly after newspapers announced that Dilbert was being dropped, billionaire and Tesla and Twitter CEO Elon Musk, said that the media had now started to become racist against white people and Asians as well.
Celebrated black Pulitzer Prize winning cartoonist, Darrin Bell recently deemed Adams as a disgrace, further stating that such racist ideals among cartoonists was not new and his remarks also indicated a growing tolerance towards racist behavior in the US.
