On the 1 to 10 nuts-o-meter, how bonkers is Scott Adams?

 Anyone who has ever worked in a cubicle has found joy in Dilbert.  While I have spent very little time in actual, literal cubicles (do grad student carrels count?), there was a time when Dilbert mattered, and if you dig through the detritus of the audio-visual media era, you will find that there was even a televised cartoon, ever so briefly.  Dilbert, himself, was voiced by Daniel Stern, who also did the voicing for The Wonder Years, which mattered for us, Gen-X'ers.  Weird, but true!  Anywho, Scott Adams is a smart person, but intelligence, sanity, and moral virtue are three traits that are not necessarily linked, regardless of Marcus Aurelius's attempt to link them.  They come apart like so many unraveled threads of mental floss.  With that in mind, I cannot resist a post for today in which I ask, on the nuts-o-meter, how bonkers is Scott Adams?

For those who have not followed the final demise of He-Of-The-Upturned-Tie, it happened like so.  Our dear cartoonist noticed a poll conducted by Rasmussen, asking African-Americans if it is "OK to be white."  53% said yes, 26% said no, and 21% said that they were not sure.  Adams responded with some comments.  To quote, he described African-Americans as a "hate group," and, "the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people."  I believe he then scratched his ass, spit some chewing tobacco, and made some sort of disparaging remark about that damned railsplitter before heading for his outhouse.

So that happened.  Have you made any interesting career decisions lately?  How'd they turn out?  Better than Scott Adams, I hope.  I'm not a fan of cancel culture, but it is hard to muster much sympathy here, I'll admit.  That said, let's try to unpack this in as minimally schadenfreude-y a way as possible, given my opposition to the concept of cancel culture.  And yes, I'm sticking with "schadenfreude-y."  Try to pronounce it.  This is the joy of a text-based interface.  You see it, and try to hear it in your head, and you cannot then unhear it!

Moving on.

That Rasmussen poll is real.  Those numbers are real, and sure, we can put error bars around them.  The margin of error, and so forth, but that only gets you so far.  Those numbers are not happy-fun numbers.  Approximately half of African-Americans directly reject animosity towards white people.  Approximately one quarter express open animosity, and about one fifth are uncertain about whether or not white people, as a group, should be viewed with antipathy, with the question posed in that particular way.  How much would those particular numbers change if we changed the wording of the question?  That is an interesting question, in some ways, but the expression of racial antipathy from approximately one quarter of the African-Americans in the sample, and racial ambivalence from another fifth is not a good thing to see.

Rasmussen does not, of course, report numbers from white respondents on whether or not it is OK to be black, and that comparison would tell us something.  There would be an asymmetry in responses, at least, and whether that asymmetry is the result of merely the social pressure against expressing racial antipathy towards African-Americans, or something else, would take more still to unpack.  Instead, Rasmussen simply reports these numbers.  Ick-ifying as they are.

What do they mean?  That is a much bigger question.  In your daily life, probably not much.  The likelihood that some radical racial group will start targeting white people in the US is more the stuff of Turner Diaries-esque delusion/fantasy/paranoid fiction than anything real, and the swift backlash against Adams comes from the relationship between his comments and Turner Diaries paranoia.

If you are white, then unless you are in academia and you have to deal with people like Brittney Cooper, the chances that you will experience anti-white antipathy with any consequences are quite low.  On the other hand, if you just go about your life interacting with African-Americans, the chances that you will be treated with just as much basic integrity as you demonstrate is high.  Yeah, academia is different, blah blah, Brittney Cooper.  She's real, people like her are real, but that's academia.  Academia sucks, but in the real world, most people are just mirrors, and their shit is your shit reflected back at you.  Mostly.

This works both ways, of course.  Racism is real, but this is a sort of accessibility heuristic problem.  You know how the phone always rings when you are in the shower?  (I don't know if this one still applies, when people turn off their ringers and just text each other, but this used to be my go-to example.)  No.  You just remember those examples, and don't keep track of the times it doesn't happen.  Suppose that the proportion of the population that is truly, deeply racist is p.  How many distinct interactions must you have before you meet a racist?  If you are out and about, the probability of meeting a racist asymptotically approaches 1, rather quickly, even if p is near 0.  The probability of not having interacted with a racist, when you meet n people is (1-p)^n.  No matter how small p is, this will asymptotically approach 0 as n increases.  Translation:  you're gonna meet a racist, even if they are a small proportion of the population.

Then, which interactions will you remember?  The innocuous ones or the ones with the racists?

And that's before the challenge of motive attribution, the mirror interaction problem, and all that.

It is easy to overestimate the effects on your life, in either direction.  Do the math.

Point being, unless you are in academia, the Rasmussen poll should be taken as little more than a warning of frayed social fabric, as though we needed more.  Tossed aside and ignored?  No, but nor should anyone freak out and head for the hills.

Which, alas, is essentially what Scott Adams is telling white people to do.  26% of African-Americans responded to the survey by saying that it is not OK to be white.  That is not good, and while I am probably not going to enjoy close relations with this Brittney Cooper slice of the demographic pie, "hate group" must have a coherent definition.  Nazis, the klan... these are hate groups.  Why do we call them hate groups?  We need a definition.  A hate group is an organized, however loosely, group of people defined by an ideology of animosity towards one or more group of people.  Nazis, the klan and similar groups meet this definition because they formed around hatred of one or more minority groups.  That is their reason for being.

Racial categories are not groups to which one chooses to belong.  Just ask Rachel Dolezal!  They are socially constructed, and while one might try to deconstruct and reject the labels (see Kmele Foster), labels like "black" or "African-American" (to the degree that we distinguish) are not just socially constructed, but externally applied to the degree that when someone like Foster rejects the label, he is demonized for it.  There is no organizing ideology at all, much less organizing ideology based on attitude towards an out-group.  There is a toxic faction-- unfortunately prominent-- which rejects the blackness of ideologically heterodox African-Americans, and Biden famously pandered to this mentality, but that is not how race was socially constructed.

While the Ibram X. Kendis of the world would certainly reject scholars like Thomas Sowell (were he capable of reading and understanding Sowell), even Kendi knows of the existence of McWhorter.  He is terrified of McWhorter, and hilariously terrified of Coleman Hughes, but the thing is, I'm not just tossing around names.  I am demonstrating the distinction between an externally imposed label, against which one cannot effectively fight, and actual groups formed around actual ideologies.  No one should have to make this point, but I set myself to the task of trying to place Scotto on the nuts-o-meter, which requires something akin to careful measurement.

Let us, then, consider the claim that white people need to get away from black people.  I can't believe I am actually writing this.  This is a thing I am writing.  A relevant person... fuck, I mean, there was some goddamned crazy rapper, but I don't care about rap.  Dilbert mattered!  Where was I?  Oh, right.  Our true Scottsman says I need to head for the hills.

Has anyone ever actually looked at hate crime statistics?  Violent crimes, overall, are geographic risks.  Which actually leads to something that... well, here's the thing.  Races are not randomly distributed across populated areas.  Call it de facto segregation, call it the correlation between race, income and rent/property values, call it what you will.  The worms are bursting out of that can.  Regardless, add the geographic component to violent crimes, and that means that most violent crime is within race rather than across race.  Start narrowing down, and violent hate crimes by African-Americans, against white people?  Anyone worried about this is not looking at the actual crime statistics because this is a thing that is so rare that you may as well be pissing yourself about lightning strikes.  And since Scotty-boy may have had a bit too much moonshine, I don't wanna know what he's pissin'.  White lightning.

And so I conclude, once again, with the Buchler-Gekko Rule:  The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that math, for lack of a better word, is good.  Math is right.  Math works.  Math clarifies, cuts through...

When the woke rewrite hits Wall Street, it'll say "folks."

The Bridge, "Old White Lightning 95."  The studio version is on Blind Man's Hill.