Put Me In, Coach

"It turns out that nearly half of that team doesn't think I'm okay to be white," [Scott Adams] said, adding that he would re-identify as white. "I'm going to back off from being helpful to Black America because it doesn't seem like it pays off," he said. "I get called a racist. That's the only outcome. It makes no sense to help Black Americans if you're white. It's over. Don't even think it's worth trying."

"I'm not saying start a war or do anything bad," he added. "Nothing like that. I'm just saying get away. Just get away."
Distributor, newspapers drop 'Dilbert' comic strip after creator's racist rant

Apparently, it hadn't occurred to Mr. Adams that "Black America" isn't a hive mind, and that some Black Americans are capable of holding a grudge.

Snark aside, Scott Adams' response to an opinion poll that asked: "Do you agree or disagree with this statement, 'It's OK to be white'?"; allegedly to assess Americans' embrace of "wokeness." And it illustrates something about the politics of White grievance; namely, it becomes aggrieved at the idea that others have grievances of their own.

It's more or less taken for granted for that for much of American history, many people would have wholeheartedly disagreed with the statement "It's okay to be Black." And, anyone who pays even occasional attention to news media in the United States would understand that there are people who would disagree with that statement today. Including one White man who decided to shoot as many people as he could in a Buffalo supermarket. In a nation where racial discrimination and animosity even persisted as public policy and law into living memory, why someone should be the least bit perturbed, let alone put out, by the idea that a pollster could find a few dozen people willing to own an opinion that White people are not okay is somewhat remarkable. Especially a person as insightful as Mr. Adams' work on Dilbert showed him to be. (Given the size of the Rasmussen poll, if they surveyed Black people in proportion to their share of the population, somewhere in the area of 34 people would have said it's not okay to be White.)

But this is part of how the current Culture Wars in the United States play out; with a bizarre insistence that a community of nearly 50 million people, many of whom have nothing more in common than related skin tones, come to a unanimous agreement that no trace remains of literally hundreds of years of various forms of what is now considered gross mistreatment. But I suppose this is what one should expect from a person who considers the Black population of the United States a "team," rather than a massive collection of individuals.

I understand the Conservative tendency to make the United States the hero of every story that they tell about it. The demand that everyone else make it the hero of their own stories is a little more difficult to credit. But they've gotten away with it for decades; it hasn't occurred to many people to argue it with them.