The ‘Honest Conversation about Race’ That We Never Have

S cott Adams was basically wrong, but what he said — and what happened to the guy — is worth talking about.

As everyone by now likely knows — I write at the pace of a classy magazine columnist, don’t you know, and this happened about a week back — Adams noted during an episode of his Coffee with Scott Adams podcast that, in a recent Rasmussen poll, 26 percent of black Americans disagreed with the innocuous-sounding statement “It’s OK to Be White.” Another 21 percent of African Americans stated that they were “not sure” whether they agreed or disagreed.

In response to these results, the man behind Dilbert, Wally, and the Pointy-Haired Boss described black Americans as a “hate group” and gave some striking advice: He told white people to “get the hell away from black people.” Like John Derbyshire lo these many years past, Adams was immediately “canceled,” with essentially every major newspaper in the United States dropping his Dilbert comic strip and media outlets running headlines like “The Day That ‘Dilbert’ Disappeared.”

So there’s a lot here. First, and importantly, Adams was basically just incorrect in his interpretation of the data. Not a statistician, the unfortunate fellow seems to have been genuinely unaware that citizens react badly to all slogans that have come to be seen as dishonest and politicized. To provide an obvious and directly comparable example, only about 31 percent of white American adults say they strongly support “the Black Lives Matter movement” — but that’s not the same as saying that only 31 percent believe that black lives matter.

Among Republicans, that “strongly support” figure is just 7 percent. When I polled about the statement “black lives matter” on social media last week, without mentioning the broader movement at all, more than a third of white males and (surprisingly) more than half of all women and members of minority groups refused to endorse it. Obviously, only a fool would interpret this data as meaning that a majority of citizens — including black citizens — think black Americans have no worth as human beings.

As odd as this might sound in the absence of context, slogans like “All Lives Matter” and “It’s OK to Be White” are almost certain to draw similar reactions. “It’s OK to Be White” began as a joking own-the-always-offended-libs slogan on the sometimes racist and always intentionally offensive niche website 4chan, and most internet-savvy young people really are quite aware of this. Probably as a result, only 67 percent of whites and 51 percent of the primarily white pool of Democrats surveyed by Rasmussen (as versus 42 percent of blacks) “strongly” agreed that it is — in fact — “OK” to be white. To put all of this silliness in context, the rate of actual racism in the 2023 United States — measured as (say) refusal to consider marriage to a member of another racial group — seems to be well below 10 percent across the major races.

But. It would be more than a bit unfair to end the conversation here: by pointing out that Adams might be a bad stats man, clapping for his firing, and moving on. The frantic national dialogue about what the Dilbert guy said brings up several other important and unavoidable points. First, there exists a truly massive, obvious, and bizarre double standard when we Americans discuss issues of race — one so extreme that there exist magic words that only certain people are allowed to say in any context.

In the specific case of Adams, as rightist commentator Ben Shapiro pointed out, the man very likely would have been offered a prestigious mainstream media job were he a witty black cartoonist who said exactly what he did with the races reversed: Polls indicate that many or most American whites are at least a bit racist, black folks thus have no choice but to view whites as dangerous, and the wise move is to get the hell away from these “mayo monsters” right now! Shapiro’s scenario of a black Scott Adams hired by the New York Times is not fanciful. Over the last 10 or 15 years, one of the fastest-growing sub-genres of hip journalism has been hit pieces accusing whites en bloc of being violent threats or (here with a bit more evidence) complete lunatics.

In 2017, the New York Times, in fact, ran an op-ed literally titled “Can My Children Be Friends with White People?” From my quick but open-minded read-through, I gleaned that the author’s answer was “not really.” Over in the wilds of Medium, Sundiata Soon-Jahta wrote a popular piece a year ago that sounds almost verbatim like Scott Adams but in reverse. His title? “Why I Walked Away from White People.” And that’s just one example. Anyone curious about whether I am exaggerating for effect can simply search on a phrase such as “the problem with white women” and spend an edifying 15 minutes perusing the results.

And — while the 26 percent of blacks who troubled Adams obviously do not genocidally hate our white countrymen, and nor do a quarter of whites harbor such hatred for blacks — this sort of thing does seem to be having an effect. One of the most remarkable and yet never-cited pieces of data out there is that race relations have consistently gotten worse during the modern era’s “racial reckoning.” In 2001, at the tail end of the “color-blind” Michael Jordan/Larry Bird phase of American life, 62 percent of white adults rated U.S. race relations as good or very good, and an even higher proportion of blacks — 70 percent ­— said the same­.

Now, however, the equivalent figures are just 43 percent for whites (a 31 percent drop ) and a stunning 33 percent for blacks (a 53 percent drop). Even patterns of interracial crime are becoming a bit more dramatic — and not in the direction that we hear obsessed about constantly. While numbers like this still represent just a tiny fraction of the 12 to 20 million serious Index crimes that take place annually, of the 607,726 violent crimes involving blacks and whites documented in the last pre-Covid Bureau of Justice Statistics report (released September 2019), 59,778 (10 percent) involved a white perpetrator and a black victim and 547,948 (90 percent) involved a black perp and a white victim. That year was a bit atypical, but the trend has been at least 75/25 in the same direction in every recent year on record.

All of this should and must be fair game to discuss. Adams was simply wrong . . . but there is an element of “come on” here. Leftists keep shouting about how we need an “honest conversation about race.” So let’s have one.