Dilbert Dropped by Newspapers over Creator's Racist Rant
nypost.com
nypost.com
People are very much easy to mold. Thanks to the internet it’s even easier.
Hasn't most of Adams’ public life and career been a very sharp public reaction to being passed over for promotion on a basis he has always blamed on racial and gender politics, even if in the early part of it more of that resentment was channelled into more broadly palatable forms than it has been recently?
I mean, he might still have been extremely racist, but it's strange how he recently came off the hinge and out of the blue decided to just spew all kinds of extremely racist statements and conspiracy theories.
If it it hadn’t been advocating that from a PoC perspective it would have been considered hate speech I guess.
[1] 2019 - https://www.wired.com/story/we-should-seriously-consider-seg...
> 1. Treat everyone as an individual (no discrimination).
> 2. Avoid any group that doesn't respect you.
The irony is that the second point is literally discrimination. Wholesale avoiding a specific race, regardless of your reasoning, is racist by definition.
This is no different than Kanye talking about “the Jews”.
Don’t take group generalizations (especially distorted ones) and prejudiciously apply them to individuals.
You inferred race
I don't know if he says that in good faith, or if there's a subtext I'm missing, but it seems like there's a reasonable way to interpret this that doesn't involve Adams harbouring an unfair negative prejudice.
I don't expect anyone is going to come along and steelman his argument for us, but I do have difficulty seeing how the NYP's article and the general reaction follows from what I naively impute from Adams' quotes.
To be clear, I'm not trying to say who's right or anything, I'm saying that I think as someone disconnected from US racial politics I seem to lack some necessary context.
If a group doesn't respect you, it's fair to ignore them. Tough shit if they are offended by the response. Plus, if you apply this to /everyone equally/ it's not discrimination.
Also as already mentioned by another commenter: group !== race
PS: Just a joke about hypocrisy of some individuals, I personally support all kinds of different discriminated groups, both locally and globally, including Jews.
Generally, Jewish people (either the religious or the ethnic group, for different reasons) per se are not generally included in “people of color”, though the religious group overlaps with “people of color”. But “people of color” is not a catch-all for all marginalized groups, or even all racial/ethnic marginalized groups, Jewish people being excluded from it is no more “hypocrisy” than “Black” not generally including East Asians.
My go to theory, is that some people, who are not quite clear of racial biases, wanted to have a name for specifically and strictly for black people, but without ever using word "black". So they have constructed a hypocritical landmine by their own hands, and after "other" people of color readily showed up, from all across the globe, they are in a collective denial.
In classical racial theory terms, Jewish people, as a (sub)racial group are, actually, White (the subcategory hierarchy running, from the top, Caucasian -> Mediterranean -> Semitic -> Jewish.)
Now, its true that despite classic racial theory being intimately connected to various forms of White supremacy, most actual forms of White supremacy include bigotry that operates on different levels than classic races, and treats lots fo White subgroups as either non-White or inferior within the broader White race, but that’s a side issue. “People of color” has never been intended to mean “every group marginalized by the particular people adhering to White supremacy in the immediate social context”; it is fairly inclusive, but its not intended as a catchall, and exclusion of people from that label is not discrimination against them.
> My go to theory, is that some people, who are not quite clear of racial biases, wanted to have a name for specifically and strictly for black people, but without ever using word “black”.
Actually, he term was one of many used during the period of de jure discrimination to refer to people of black ancestry (in some times and places, like “mulatto”, with precise legal definitions which distinguished it from “black”.)
From there it was one of many terms adopted to varying degrees within the community of black ancestry (sometimes, as equivalent to “black”, and sometimes, within some corners of the community that use “black” more narrowly, with a broader definition.)
It faded as an identity label within that community, and was recycle for broader use fairly recently (“black and brown” has been used in a fairly similar sense for a longer time, and still has considerable currency; a lot of activists will use “black and brown people” as the general collective term, but something like “woman of color” when referring to an individual – actual or hypothetical – person.)
The main problem I have with Dilbert's comics is that they are nowhere near as great as they were 10, or even 20 years ago.
I didn't figure out that Tracy Hickman of Dragonlance fame was a man until the 2010s - and I read the books in the late 80's / early 90's. Teenage me happily thought that the books were written by two women and didn't think past it.
But, most people won't take it at face value, and those who responded to the survey didn't likely have this interpretation either.
Adams fell right into the trap of responding to this sort of bait.
Not that he'd ever have been the spokesman for radically rethinking race relations. But no, I don't expect he's secretly a klansman.