Scott Adams, the extremely successful American cartoonist, posted a melancholy tweet the other day to his 2.7 million followers: “Dilbert has been cancelled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books because I gave some advice everyone agreed with”.
Ah, cancellation, the Black Death of the new millennium, scourge of everyone who is not racist/sexist/anti-LGBTQIA+ but who has an opinion everyone agrees with and isn’t afraid to share it.
Adams’ opinion, expressed in an online video, has been reported globally in abbreviated terms: that Black people are “a hate group” and that white people should “get the hell away” from them.
That is not entirely fair to Adams; his point was a little more nuanced. He was discussing a poll that had reported that only 53% of Black Americans surveyed agreed with the statement “It’s OK to be white” (26% disagreed and 21% weren’t sure).
Adams was dismayed, saying that “if nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people… that’s a hate group. I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people…because there is no fixing this.”
See? Not racist at all; the racists are the Black people who don’t like white people. As Adams explained post-cancellation (his cartoons have been dropped by pretty much every media outlet in the world in the past few days), he was merely “advising people to avoid hate”.
The free speech purist might here argue that Adams does indeed have a point: he wasn’t calling for violence or vilification of Black people, only reacting to what he saw as racism directed at him (or rather, his people) and taking up a defensive stance accordingly. Not to attack them, but to get away from them. Like running away from a white supremacist wielding a gun.
Which would be fine if we were prepared to park our intellects long enough to ignore the obvious: Adams was operating directly from the dog-eared playbook of white supremacists.
We’ve had the same here: recall Pauline Hanson on the floor of the Australian Senate in 2018, putting a motion that the chamber should acknowledge “the deplorable rise of anti-white racism and attacks on Western civilisation” and that “it is okay to be white”. The Coalition senators supported her motion, which was only narrowly defeated 31 votes to 28.
Richard Di Natale, then the Greens leader, correctly observed at the time that the slogan “It’s OK to be white” had a “long history in the white supremacist movement”.
Five years later, that hasn’t changed. Adams couldn’t credibly claim ignorance of the true significance of the slogan, even if he didn’t personally already have a track record of racist commentary. Which he does.
He was fully aware, therefore, that the poll was itself a racist provocation, akin to asking Jews if it’s OK to give a straight-arm salute. That more than half of the Black respondents actually agreed with the proposition is the extraordinary thing.
The trope of anti-white racism is not new, of course, and is seeing one of its frequent re-emergences at the moment in the lower depths of the Voice debate where one can find Andrew Bolt, rolling out his tired “It’s racist, I tells ya!” whine at any suggestion that the “first” in First Nations should ever be afforded a meaning.
Reverse racism, as it’s often also called, is not a thing that exists outside the brains of actual racists. Everyone has racist moments, to greater or lesser degrees, but the essential element of truly toxic racism — assumed racial or ethnic superiority — only lives in those who punch down. Sure, some Black people hate white people, like plenty of Ukrainians are presently hating Russians, and it’s not hard to see why. That isn’t a basis for equating their feelings with those of racial supremacists.
But, whatever. Inescapably, you wouldn’t think to say what Adams said unless you already hated — or, to be more precise, existentially feared — Black people, and were just looking for an excuse to mask your racism with logic. Banal, transparently disingenuous logic, as it happens.
To be clear, Adams hasn’t been cancelled at all, despite his plaintive moaning. His comic strip, commercial deals and royalty flows have been cancelled, by companies that no longer wish to be associated with him because he’s a racist. That’s their right, as it was his right to say what he said.
Adams can, and no doubt will, go on tweeting to his followers, buoyed by the personal support of Elon Musk — whose take on the story was that it’s the media, not Adams, who are the racists.
Hot tip: if you do find yourself agreeing with Adams’ advice, you’re a racist too.
