Hundreds of American newspapers have announced this week that they will stop the office strip Dilbert after racist statements by the creator Scott Adams. This is reported by the relevant newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. The decision follows a livestream on Adams’ YouTube channel in which the cartoonist called black people a “hate group.” The office strip Dilbert appeared in hundreds of U.S. newspapers, both nationally and regionally, since 1989.
In his video published Tuesday, Adams said of black Americans: “That’s a hate group and I don’t want anything to do with them.” He added that “it makes no sense to help black Americans if you’re white” and that “white people should get away from black people.” Adams has previously been criticized for extremist views and online provocations. For example, he was in the news in 2019 because he used a shooting in California as an advertisement for an app he had developed.
The newspaper The San Francisco Chronicle already put an end to the publication of Adams’ comics in October, after jokes about enslaved and gay men, among other things. Editor-in-chief Emilio Garcia-Ruiz said that the comic went “from hilarious to hurtful”. The Dutch could read the daily strip in the past in The Financial Telegraph and office magazine Intermediary. After the latter stopped in 2012, Dutch Dilbertfans can still satisfy their hunger for comics with calendars and books, among other things.