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Looks like Dilbert is being pulled from newspapers following controversial remarks by its creator, Scott Adams https://www.foxnews.com/us/laid-off-newspapers-drop-office-cartoon-dilbert-over-creators-racial-remarks
I don't think this is quite that big of deal personally. He has FU money and his brand/career at punditry keeps growing. I think his bigger risk would is being de-platformed from Youtube/Twitter. He don't need Dilbert anymore but he does need his Youtube and Twitter accounts.
Scott Adams seems to have updated quite strongly on a 1000 person poll, which included black people, over the nuance of who agreed with an apparent well known(?) racist dog whistle.
He decides from here that black people hate white people and that white people must get away from them. Then he hurls some fairly ready to go insults about black people in general that I guess he was just saving for this?
He seems as... crazed ... as usual here, but I do agree he's being taken out of context. He obviously feels betrayed because he thought of himself as a fierce advocate for black people (??) but learning that all black people might still have problems with all white people completely flipped him.
I'm trying to think of a more fair headline. Maybe: Dilbert creator decides black people are hate group after reading one small poll about a racist dog whistle, cautions white people to "get the fuck away" from black people.
Is he crazed? I think he might be a bit set off because he is upset about learning about the huge black bigotry problem that the less...influential set of online intellectuals have known about for decades. He also seems to just be vocalizing what people do anyways: move away from black people because they are violent and will make your life suck. From a post I read elsewhere, apparently he is taking a victory lap on that latter point now. His new claim is people are pretending to be angry because they agree with him. I personally have no insight into the inner workings of a white progressive that seeks out "good schools" for his/her children, but he is either correct, or simply underestimating the level of doublethink most people can hold.
This poll does not demonstrate that at all, because the slogan in question has become so loaded among people aware of the controversy.
I mean, you might say that, but its a pre-existing known issue. If this is the tripwire that opened his eyes, it is that.
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The people looking for good schools are, I am fairly sure, actually looking for good schools. At least "good schools" as defined by helicopter parents and Tiger Moms. (Though as another poster on another forum pointed out, there are some who avoid districts with too many Asians because they don't think the resulting high-pressure high-homework environment is good; this is probably as racist as they get). That this strongly anti-correlates with black and Hispanic population is probably something they avoid thinking about.
The ones who are looking for "safety" are likely more of a mixed bag. I suspect it runs the gamut from those who simply assume black-and-Hispanic means dangerous to those who are aware of it and mildly embarrassed to those who are full crimestop and don't think about it.
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Half of black Americans declined to say it was okay to be white. Yes, it was just one poll. But isn't that the only part of this story that can reasonably be labeled 'crazy'?
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I've listened to him for a while off and on, IMO this is his usual schtick, to find a news item of interest and discuss it from a perspective of taking it maximally seriously. This leads to him frequently seeming to take contradictory positions. He's previously said things like, if Confederate statues make black people uncomfortable than we should indeed take them down, and take words they find offensive, i.e. the N word, out of our vocabulary, etc. I've never seen him approach things from a perspective of, my true worldview overall is X, is event Y a good enough reason to update it?
The weird part IMO is he must have known something like this would happen if he applied his usual MO to this story in this way. I wonder why he chose to do it now. Maybe he just doesn't care much?
I'd also say, if you don't already know that a very substantial number of black people (not all, but definitely more than a few percent) really truly do hate white people, where've you been, and have you ever really talked to black people?
I mean, I don't necessarily feel sympathy for him since he says lots of inflammatory stuff and has what looks like deranged thinking processes. But I do think if he goes down it should be over things he actually said.
The black people I consider friends don't say how much they hate white people. Biased sample perhaps!
That said, it's plausible that half of black people think it's bad to be white just not sure this survey is the one to go to production on, given the small sample and the general confusion around using a dog whistle to measure sentiment.
IME, the majority of upper-middle class American white people have a big blind spot about this due to only interacting with black people in contexts they find familiar. Where do most people meet their friends? School, work, hobbies, sports, music, etc. If you do mostly typical white people things for those, the only black people you will meet and have the opportunity to talk in depth with and befriend are the one who have already chosen to step away from primarily black activities and participate in mostly white activities for an extended amount of time.
Unless you go out of your way to do something unusual for your race and class, like get deeply enthusiastic about rap music or playing pickup basketball, and stay with it despite being one of only a handful of white people (how do you think those black guys who choose to do white stuff feel?), you will never meet the black people who mostly want to stay around their own and do their own things and never hear the kinds of things they say to each other.
It's a hard thing to study or do research on, and there's not much media out there that covers it. I have no idea how to get hard numbers on it. It's definitely out there though. The Boondocks TV series has some good examples. If you've read Freakonomics, there's a passage in the story about a university researcher embedding with an urban Chicago crack gang, whose leader happens to be a black college graduate with a business degree who tried working in a normal legitimate business but felt too out of place there. Consider the deeper meaning - everyone around him must have understood what he was talking about and why he chose to leave a white-collar job to lead a crack-dealing gang.
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