‘Dilbert’ Creator Scott Adams Says He Won’t Apologize for Offending People With Comments on Race

In his first network TV interview since being kicked off the pages of hundreds of newspapers for comments widely perceived as racist, the creator and writer of the Dilbert comic strip declined to apologize.

“No, because I did it intentionally,” Scott Adams told Chris Cuomo on Monday night’s edition of NewsNation’s Cuomo, after Cuomo asked whether he felt he owed people who were offended an apology. “I offended people so that they’d be drawn to the solution.”

Adams repeated again and again that he’d meant to rile people up when he said on the Feb. 22 edition of the YouTube show Real Coffee With Scott Adams, while discussing a Rasmussen poll, that white people should “get the hell away from Black people” and called Black people a “hate group.”

Within days, Adams’s cartoon, which riffed on office culture before The Office or even the movie Office Space, was pulled. {snip}

Adams told the Washington Post in a story published Monday that he’d lost 80 percent of his income as a result. He insisted then that he’s against racism.

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During the time when viewers could call in, a woman who identified herself as a Black teacher and a longtime fan of Adams’s comic strip called in to say that she had been hurt by his comments. She asked how she should explain this kind of rhetoric to her students.

“So here’s the quick summary: I was concerned that there was a lot of anti-whiteness. I used some hyperbole, but my purpose was to teach them and anybody else who wants to listen the tools for success,” advised Adams {snip}

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Later, the interviewee asked that, if a Black man or woman had said what he said exactly or in reverse, did people think that person would be canceled.

“Everybody knows the answer is rhetorical,” Adams said, laughing. “There’s not a chance in the world they’d have been canceled. So I wanted as much free speech as Black America. {snip}”

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