The demise of 'Dilbert': Scott Adams merely said what white America has long done

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When Scott Adams, creator of the "Dilbert" cartoon strip, last week quoted poll results to justify a racist rant advising white people to "just get the hell away" from Black people, whom he labeled "a hate group," condemnations were swift.

Hundreds of newspapers (including the Star Tribune) dropped the comic strip, Adams' publisher scrapped plans to release his next book, and he said his book agent "canceled" him.

So what was in that poll? Adams referred to the responses to one question: "Do you agree or disagree with this statement: 'It's OK to be white.' " Among Black respondents, 53% agreed, 26% disagreed and 21% weren't sure. Most Black people, in other words, said there's nothing wrong with being white.

But what does "OK to be white" mean? What does "OK" mean in this context? Also: Why single out Black people? Fully 41% of respondents who were neither white nor Black also didn't answer in the affirmative — 20% of white people didn't.

During his diatribe, Adams said that for years, he's been "identifying as Black" because he likes to be on the "winning team" and he likes to "help."

Adams was consoling himself for failing in the role of white savior while justifying the embrace of the centuries-old white fatalism about and exhaustion with the so-called Negro problem, a supposedly intractably lost cause that consumes energy and resources to no avail because, in the minds of some white people, Black people are pathologically broken.

As Adams concluded: "There's no fixing this. … You just have to escape. So that's what I did. I went to a neighborhood where I have a very low Black population."

He's not alone.

Since the process of school desegregation began in the 1950s, followed by the gains of the civil rights movement of the 1960s, including the passage of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, and after the civil unrest in major cities before and after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., we saw a tsunami of white flight that transformed cities across America.

But in the decades that followed, as more Black people trickled out to the suburbs to which white people had fled, there was some ebb to segregation and some hope that it was coming to an end.

What about today? America is re-segregating. A 2021 analysis by the Othering & Belonging Institute at the University of California, Berkeley, found that "out of every metropolitan region in the United States with more than 200,000 residents, 81% (169 out of 209) were more segregated as of 2019 than they were in 1990."

That pattern contributes to more segregation in our schools, which research has shown has negative outcomes, particularly for Black children.

Adams blithely pronounced that Black people are haters who have to "fix" their "own problem" because "everybody else figured it out." He said, "Focus on education, and you could have a good life, too."

But the attendant problems of segregation — past and present — affect public elementary and high schools and extend to higher education. A 2021 Brookings Institution paper noted that not only does the overall Black-white wealth gap remain stark but "white college graduates have seven times more wealth than Black college graduates" and Black college graduates "experience more difficulty in accumulating wealth than white college graduates since they accrue more student loan debt."

What Adams doesn't acknowledge — or possibly doesn't understand — is that the problems that make white people like him want to flee can be traced, in large measure, to the decisions that many white people have made.

There have always been people in this country who looked at Black people as a problem that needed to be contained, suppressed or escaped. There have always been those who preferred a white-flight ethos, who felt most at home with homogeneity, who felt that the best way to deal with Black people was with a remove.

It was the way some people in the South reacted when enslaved Black people were emancipated or the way some in the North reacted when throngs of Black people began to arrive as part of the Great Migration.