Commentary
OPINION: ‘Dilbert’ Creator’s New Anti-Woke Strategy—’You Are A Hate Group!’
Adams use of a conservative poll as justification to make racist statements against Blacks is more than a little ridiculous. It’s also a little sad because Adams sounded serious. Adams used a poll from Rasmussen Reports that showed 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement that it’s “OK to be white.”

I confess, I haven’t seen Scott Adams’ Dilbert comic strip in ages. Who even gets a newspaper that carries it anymore? Alas, after this week, Dilbert is as dead as a dodo.
Hallelujah.
Adams use of a conservative poll as justification to make racist statements against Blacks is more than a little ridiculous. It’s also a little sad because Adams sounded serious.
Adams used a poll from Rasmussen Reports that showed 53% of Black Americans agreed with the statement that it’s “OK to be white.”
That statement, “OK to be white,” has a history of being associated with white supremacy movements, according to the Anti-Defamation League.
So, Adams asked aloud on his YouTube video, if 53% of Blacks in the poll were good with the statement about whites, what about the others who weren’t sure?
Adams said the 47% who disagreed or weren’t sure, made the conclusion clear to him.
Blacks were a hate group!
He wasn’t joking.
Adams concluded in a video rant, “The best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”
Adams was justifying segregation. From a falsely accused hate group in his mind —Blacks.
And he seemed adamant. “Just get away,” he said. “Because there’s no fixing it.”
Does he mean there’s no fixing Clarence Thomas? Because I believe that.
Still, the only fixing needed seems to be Adams’ warped perception.
Just seems like quite a leap to extrapolate all that he does from a simple public opinion poll.
But Adams seems to be showcasing an emerging tactic of the anti-woke, pro-white movement.
Just call your enemy a “hate group.”
It gives white supremacists in their minds the leverage of moral superiority. Imagine, a group that hates more than they do?
This is pro-fascist, pro-white logic in action. It’s worked for Fox News and Trump, so far. We’ll see how long it lasts after the Dominion Voting machines defamation suit against the conglomerate. Adams is simply showing how easy it is to call your enemy a hater.
Fortunately, sane people see it for what it is. Newspapers that have been carrying Adams for decades are cancelling ‘Dilbert.’
Not that Adams seems to care about losing business or money. He has enough. After more decades creating a newspaper panel strip about a workplace dullard in a far from diverse and sensitive worksite, it may be that Adams was just looking for a way to go down with a bang, a way to say goodbye, as his strip was becoming more and more irrelevant.
And Adams only seems to be implying a half-hearted first amendment argument. Probably because it falls flat. No one stopped Adams from saying what he wanted to on his video. Besides, free speech laws apply to government business not to the private corporate world Adams deals in. Businesses have a right not to work with self-declared public racists. Nothing wrong there.
So, Adams was either bored with Dilbert, or he was just modeling behavior for the other male and female Ken/Karen-types, conservative whites who feel threatened by a diverse America, not just of Blacks but the entire BIPOC community.
Adams was the role model with the hot take: it’s OK to hate a hate group.
These are the sentiments of a paranoid anti-Woke crowd. Maybe Dilbert wants to run for office?
I really had to think hard the last time I even saw the Dilbert comic strip. I couldn’t recall if I’d ever seen a person of color in any Dilbert panel cartoon? Sadly, you can still get away with segregation in the comic strips. But sure enough, the first Black character in Dilbert, was Dave the engineer in 2022.
He’s much darker than Dilbert and in his introduction, Dave delivers the punchline, “I identify white.”
And I’m positive it wasn’t a matter of affirmative action, but of merit. Still, Dave needed the help of a white man. Adams had to draw it.
And maybe that’s the point. Dilbert, a white drone in a diverse work force, may have run out of funny things to say — that weren’t racist. In a work force of aggrieved whites quietly quitting, Adams had to go out loudly.
Adams’ rant was a nostalgic cry not for a brighter, optimistic America, but for the way things used to be in the 1950s. Only with faster computers. And decent Wi-Fi.
Adams and Dilbert deserve what they’re getting.
If they wanted to be cancelled, I’m more than happy to oblige.
Emil Guillermo is a journalist, commentator and storyteller. See him at www.amok.com.
Activism
Oakland Post: Week of March 15 – 21, 2023
The printed Weekly Edition of the Oakland Post: Week of March 15 – 21, 2023

To enlarge your view of this issue, use the slider, magnifying glass icon or full page icon in the lower right corner of the browser window.
Arts and Culture
What Asian American Oscar Victories Mean for All of Us
After the Oscars, when Asian Americans were everywhere on the winners list, from actors, writers, directors, but also makeup artists, and not just in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but also in movies like “The Whale,” I turn to the Oakland playwright Ishmael Reed who must be wondering will Asian Americans now go for the Whiteness Prize?

By Emil Guillermo
After the Oscars, when Asian Americans were everywhere on the winners list, from actors, writers, directors, but also makeup artists, and not just in “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” but also in movies like “The Whale,” I turn to the Oakland playwright Ishmael Reed who must be wondering will Asian Americans now go for the Whiteness Prize?
(I consider Asian American to be a generic term, indicating people of Asian descent either living or working not necessarily indicative of their citizenship status.)
I’m in New York as an actor in “The Conductor,” the latest Reed production now off-Broadway (get your in-person or live-streamed tickets here: https://theaterforthenewcity.net/shows/the-conductor-2023/).
I play a brown-skinned Tucker Carlson-type on a faux Fox, and very conservative news network.
That’s how good an actor I am!
As an Asian American sometime-actor, I’m gratified to see Asian American creatives take their historic star turn at the Oscars. Asians have won the Academy Award for best supporting actor before, but never has there been a best actor/actress winner until the Malaysia-born, Hollywood-based Michelle Yeoh last weekend.
There’s something about being a “first.” A “never before.”
But what’s next?
And that’s where Reed’s play got me thinking.
In Reed’s “The Conductor,” Blacks start a new underground railroad to help Indian Americans — not American Indians, but those from the continent of India — escape a wave of xenophobia that is forcing them to flee to Canada.
The main character, columnist Warren Chipp is Reed’s alter ego. When a conservative Indian seeks refuge and asks Chipp why the liberal Chipp is being so nice to him, Chipp reveals his grasp of irony.
“Minorities make alliances with us (Blacks) until their admission to the white club is accepted. This happened to the Jews, the Japanese, the Irish, the Italians and now you guys (Asian Indians).”
It’s just one of the provocative asides in the play, but the historical examples are there.
Says Chipp/Reed: “These groups come running to us when the white man decides to sic mobs on them because of some geopolitical conflict or culture war. Begging us to hide them and save them. And then, when they get an ‘all-clear’ sign, they return to auditioning for whiteness again. Lining up and trampling over each other, asking white people to ‘choose me!’ Some of them even change their names to go Anglo.”
Reed says it’s the root of “Afro-Pessimism.”
What’s that?
It’s a term by Frank Wilderson, as Reed explains, that means Blacks can’t depend upon Blacks’ “junior allies.” Wilderson calls B.S. on intersectionality and says that Blacks “must go it alone.”
After rehearsals and the first four performances, the passages from the play haunt me.
Especially last Sunday. When the Asian Americans were preparing for their Oscar turn, I was off-Broadway living Reed’s play.
Is the Model Minority now back to auditioning for whiteness again?
I hope not. I get what Reed’s saying in his play. But I see the Oscar victory as a win for not just Asian Americans but all BIPOC communities in all their unique narratives.
AAPI stories have a kind of heat now. An independent film about a family with a laundromat dealing with the IRS and the multiverse where people have hotdogs as fingers puts us in a whole new ballgame.
We aren’t so weird after all. We’re of immigrant descent, sure. We’re different, yes. But we’re of the modern world and our stories deal in universal truths.
People flocked to “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” which gave it some cache as an indie project that was making money. Not like “Top Gun” money, but enough to satisfy Hollywood accountants. Once it caught the attention of the Academy looking for diversity, the film was simply recognized for its off-beat ingenuity and its creative weirdness.
I was having lunch in New York’s Chinatown with a lawyer friend of mine, a Chinese American immigrant and also a triple Harvard (College, Law School, and MBA) graduate. My friend surprised me when he said he couldn’t understand the hype about “Everything, Everywhere…”
He called it unwatchable. He liked the movie “Tar.”
I told him maybe it was generational. Just goes to show you that not everyone, not even Asian Americans are on board with “Everything, Everywhere…”
But the huge victory on Sunday makes the film like a Golden Spike in Hollywood. The track is finally connected and open for AAPI creatives bound for glory.
“Everything, Everywhere…” has put everyone in the equation on notice. We have stories to tell that sell, and that people want to see.
Stories that win Oscars.
I see the phenomenon as a rising Asian American film lifts all boats. And with AAPI at just over 6% of the population, I don’t buy the “Afro-Pessimism” idea in his play.
We can’t go it alone. We don’t have the numbers. We need each other.
Like anything worthwhile, it’s going to have to be done together.
Emil Guillermo is a journalist and commentator. See his vlog on www.amok.com And see “The Conductor” in person or live-streamed tickets here: https://theaterforthenewcity.net/shows/the-conductor-2023/
Ben Jealous
COMMENTARY: A Historic Vote and the Tools It Gave Us
Vice President Kamala Harris is sure to be remembered every March in Women’s History Month as the first woman and the first person of color to serve our nation in that position. As notable as those two facts are, she may grow to be known just as much for a single vote in the Senate that helped save the planet.

By Ben Jealous
Vice President Kamala Harris is sure to be remembered every March in Women’s History Month as the first woman and the first person of color to serve our nation in that position. As notable as those two facts are, she may grow to be known just as much for a single vote in the Senate that helped save the planet.
Last August, she broke the 50-50 deadlock between Democrats and Republicans in the Senate to pass the Inflation Reduction Act. That historic package, along with the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act that Harris had crisscrossed the country in 2021 to build support for, give us a once-in-a-generation chance to protect the climate and build a cleaner, fairer economy.
Both laws bear Harris’ mark. For example, the two packages provide billions to replace diesel school buses with electric ones and an additional tax credit for purchases that counties and cities make on their own. As a senator, Harris repeatedly sponsored bills to electrify the nation’s school buses. Similarly, she championed proposals to help recovery in low-income communities that bear a disproportionate burden of pollution and climate; the IRA includes $60 billion directed to help those places.
Harris’ role inside and outside Washington on environmental issues isn’t surprising. When she was elected San Francisco’s district attorney 20 years ago, she started one of the first environmental justice units in a prosecutor’s office. When she moved on to be California’s attorney general, she fought to protect the state from fossil fuel interests, winning tens of millions in civil settlements and a criminal indictment against the pipeline company responsible for an oil spill off Santa Barbara, as well as suing the federal government to block fracking off the coast. It’s a path others have been able to follow in the years since (Columbia University keeps a database of attorneys general’s environmental actions now).
It’s a concern that runs deep. Like I did, Harris grew up in environmentally conscious northern California in a household deeply involved in the civil rights movement. She learned early that conservation was a good thing, so much so that she has joked she couldn’t understand as a youngster why people she knew said conservatives were bad.
The Biden-Harris administration has provided leadership. With Congress, they’ve given us the tools to clean up pollution, to boost communities’ resilience to climate related natural disasters like wildfires, and to create good jobs in clean manufacturing across the country in unprecedented ways. Through the infrastructure and inflation reduction packages, the United States can spend more than double protecting Earth than we spent putting astronauts on the moon.
“I think we all understand we have to be solutions driven. And the solutions are at hand,” Harris said at a climate summit earlier this month. “We need to make up for some lost time, no doubt. This is going to have an exponential impact on where we need to go.”
It’s time for the rest of us to pick up those tools and build. There are powerful interests that would be more than happy to let the inertia that allows people and places to be treated as disposable continue indefinitely. Our planet can’t afford that, and we have to marshal a movement to prevent it.
Ben Jealous is executive director of the Sierra Club. He is a professor of practice at the University of Pennsylvania and author of “Never Forget Our People Were Always Free,” published in January.
-
Activism4 days ago
Oakland Post: Week of March 15 – 21, 2023
-
Activism2 weeks ago
Oakland Post: Week of March 8 – 14, 2023
-
Activism3 weeks ago
Oakland Post: Week of March 1 – 7, 2023
-
Activism4 weeks ago
Oakland Post: Week of February 22 – 28, 2023
-
Bay Area2 weeks ago
Help Save North Oakland Missionary Baptist Church, the 2nd oldest Black Church in Oakland
-
Bay Area2 weeks ago
Deadlocked OUSD Board Fails to Approve Proposed Budget That Would Cut Programs, Lay Off Teachers, Close Schools
-
Bay Area2 weeks ago
Alameda County Supervisors Will Allow Tenant Eviction Protections to Expire at End of April: Oakland’s eviction moratorium remains in effect for local residents
-
Activism2 weeks ago
Reparations: California Legislative Analyst’s Office Proposes “Paths” For Payments