zlacker

Scott Adams died today. I want to acknowledge something complicated.

He always felt culturally like family to me. His peaks—the biting humor about corporate absurdity, the writing on systems thinking and compounding habits, the clarity about the gap between what organizations say and what they do—unquestionably made me healthier, happier, and wealthier. If you worked in tech in the 90s and 2000s, Dilbert was a shared language for everything broken about corporate life.

His views, always unapologetic, became more strident over time and pushed everyone away. That also felt like family.

You don’t choose family, and you don’t get to edit out the parts that shaped you before you understood what was happening. The racism and the provocations were always there, maybe, just quieter. The 2023 comments that ended Dilbert’s newspaper run were unambiguous.

For Scott, like family, I’m a better person for the contribution. I hope I can represent the good things: the humor, the clarity of thought, the compounding good habits with health and money. I can avoid the ugliness—the racism, the grievance, the need to be right at any cost.

Taking inventory is harder than eulogizing or denouncing. But it’s more honest.

>>jchall+(OP)
> The racism and the provocations were always there

Were they? Can you cite an example? Because I also grew up with Dilbert, and I was never aware of it.

>>lisper+eX
It's in Chapter 1 of his autobiography. He used to work at a bank in the 80s, and was turned down for a managerial or executive position (can't remember) which went to an Asian candidate. He was certain it was due to DEI (in the 80s!) and quit the corporate world to become a cartoonist.

The strip that got him dropped in 2022 featured a black character (first in the history of the cartoon) who "identifies as white".

>>rchaud+U51
How is this racism? It's a complaint about alleged racism and a pun on corporate "Identifies as black" DEI events. He is not saying anything negative about asian candidate or black character.

>>cat_pl+Ax1
It mocks diversity policies by presenting race as arbitrary and surface-level, rather than some deeply unchangeable thing that pervades every aspect of your being. Since diversity policies are a way to push back against judging people differently based on race (aka racism), mocking them is inherently supportive of racism.

And as the other commenter says, it also mocks trans people. By applying their language to something presented as arbitrary and surface-level.

>>tbrown+tL1
Maybe this is a generational thing, but that first sentence is nonsensical to me. DEI wants to enshrine race differences, so mocking DEI is… racist?

>>Yodel0+d22
It’s a hard thing to wrap your head around, but: the idea is that racial differences are already enshrined, by racists. if racists weren’t pushing the idea, it would hardly be an idea at all.

Try explaining to a “go back to where you belong” racists that you’re not from Africa (or from Mexico, or wherever) - you have a different ethnic background, or you’re a natural born citizen - racists don’t care about the nuance, you’re coloured and they’re bigoted, and race differences are enshrined.

So if that’s the case - if you’re just going to be lumped into the same bucket as every other (say) black person anyway - then you’re only going to make yourself weaker by dividing yourselves - you need to organize to push back against racism, and that means your natural allies are going to be all the other people that racists are racist about - and by extension, all the other people bigots are bigoted about. Now it doesn’t matter if you were born in Egypt, or in the Sudan, or in Somalia or Jamaica or Haiti or Illinois- racists all treat you as ‘black’, and it’s on that basis, that shared identity as people oppressed for being black, that you struggle for justice.

And what is justice if not redress?

Anyway the point I’m making here is, it’s not DEI that’s enshrining race - it’s racists. The reason DEI is organized along racial lines is because that’s how racism is applied by the bigots who believe in that crap.

Very much along the same lines of why “all lives matter” in response to “black lives matter” is a very deliberately racist statement - because it’s mocking the struggle of oppressed people to get justice for themselves and to defend themselves from their oppressors.