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‘Make America Dilbert Again?’ [1]

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Date: 2023-02-27  

...you have a perception problem

Like most things that involve race in America, logic, nuance, and meaning are hostage to grandstanding. The creator of the comic Dilbert, Scott Adams, fully displayed his faux intellectualism shrouded in a racial tirade worthy of former Alabama Governor the late George Wallace. The conservative polling organization Rasmussen restored a trolling statement it’s okay to be white started by racist online groups on web forums. This time an interrogative preceded it. Do you agree or disagree with this statement, “It’s okay to be white, and submitted it to its readers. A little research would inform anyone who bothered that the effort to place the question of the legitimacy of whiteness in the ethos was made in 2017 and 2018 on college campuses by white supremacists.

The poll—resulted in 73 percent of people agreeing, including 53 percent of blacks, prompting Adams’ reaction to mimic the hatred, discrimination, and mistrust he railed against. Adams advised white Americans to quote, “get the hell away from Black people.” His logic was that if without question or context, nearly half of black Americans do not agree it’s okay to be white, he no longer wants to help or live around any black Americans.

If it quacks like a duck

“I think it makes no sense whatsoever as a white citizen of America to try to help Black citizens anymore. It doesn’t make sense; it’s no longer a rational impulse,” Adams said. “So I’m gonna back off ... ’cause it doesn’t seem like it pays off — like I’ve been doing it all my life, and the only outcome is that I get called a racist.”

I am unsure what “payoff” Mr. Adams was looking to achieve. Is it equity in housing? I guess not; he does not want people like me in his neighborhood. A return to school segregation? If not, that would mean blacks would be involved in his utopian white community. Drinking from the same fountain, oops, another shared community activity.

Possibly the answer is the Marjorie Taylor Greene solution, a national divorce of red and blue states with the black kids being wards of the state. Like the segregationists of the past, racist logic is more often than not offered as a reason. “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay, and red and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows that he did not intend for the races to mix,” said Judge Leon M. Bazile in 1967 about the Loving v. Virginia case. “White people, wake up before it is too late. Do you want Negroes working beside you, your wife, and your daughters, in your mills and factories?” Said the late former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms.

Unlike his predecessors, Scott Adams described his hateful rhetoric as “useful provocation.” Lost in the controversy of Mr. Adams was the second question, “Do you agree or disagree with this statement: “Black people can be racist, too?” I have heard that question debated all my life as if black people are super beings incapable of the sins of man. As a black man, I am capable of mistakes and prejudices; the difference is black Americans have lacked the power to Dilbert.

Continue to Vote for Change

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/2/27/2155230/--Make-America-Dilbert-Again

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