Once-popular cartoon scrapped from hundreds of papers after Scott Adams calls Black people a ‘hate group’ on his YouTube show
The cartoon “Dilbert” has been dropped from numerous US newspapers in response to racist comments by its creator, Scott Adams, on his YouTube channel.
Adams called Black Americans a “hate group” and suggested white Americans “get the hell away from Black people” in response to a conservative organization’s poll purporting to show that many African Americans do not agree with the statement: “It’s OK to be white.”
The Anti-Defamation League says the phrase was popularised in 2017 as a trolling campaign by members of the discussion forum 4chan and was then used by some white supremacists.
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with white people … that’s a hate group,” said Adams, who is white, on his YouTube channel on Wednesday. “And I don’t want to have anything to do with them.”
The comments ignited a furor on social media, along with calls for the conservative cartoonist’s work to be dropped from publishers’ rosters.
His once-popular comic strip, which lampoons corporate culture and was launched in 1989, will no longer be carried by the Los Angeles Times, the , the USA Today-affiliated group of newspapers and others, the newspapers announced in statements on Friday and Saturday.
