Taking Scott Adams Seriously

with John McWhorter

When cartoonist Scott Adams’s comments urged white people to “get the hell away from black people,” he caught hell. His mega-popular strip Dilbert—a mainstay on comics pages for decades—was dropped by newspapers across the country. He was excoriated in the media. And, in the present political climate, one can see why. His remarks were crude and, for most commentators, easy to denounce.

I cannot endorse the idea that white people should, as a matter of course, intentionally segregate themselves from black people. And yet, I cannot dismiss the sentiment to which Adams was giving voice. Neither can John, as we discuss in this excerpt from our recent Substack subscriber-only Q&A session. Put aside the small number of white people who harbor real racial animus and simply don’t want to be around black people at all. There are plenty of well-meaning, unprejudiced—even, dare I say it, “woke”—white people who may prefer to live in racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse urban neighborhoods but who nevertheless feel compelled by crime, bad schools, and other quality of life issues to move out to homogenous suburbs, where day-to-day life is, frankly, easier and more comfortable. Whatever discomfort they are willing to endure in order to enjoy the real benefits of diverse neighborhoods often comes up short when measured against the well-being and flourishing of their children.

Are these well-meaning, unprejudiced people actually racist for feeling compelled to move? Such a question fails to capture the complexity of the competing interests at play. On the one hand, a desire to experience and contribute to the often astonishing richness of American urban life, to further enrich and be enriched by that way of living. On the other hand, a desire to find safety and security for oneself and one’s family. I don’t think there is an objectively “right” decision between these two (admittedly caricatured) options. But it’s both incorrect and futile to insist that the real problem is that racist white people don’t want to be around black people. That may guilt white families into sticking around for a while longer than they would have. But ultimately, if they feel they have to leave, they’re going to leave. You can call them racist if you want to, but they won’t be around to hear you.

---

This is an excerpt from a Substack subscriber-only bonus episode. For access to the full episode, plus early access to TGS episodes, an ad-free podcast feed, and other exclusive content and benefits, click below.

---

GLENN LOURY: This is from D.G., the initials D.G., but many asked this question in this round of soliciting questions from our listeners.

I would be interested in hearing more of you guys' perspective on the Scott Adams question, or more generally the idea of white people "avoiding" black people. I live in the DC area, and the penalties for everything from carjacking to subway fair evasion have been reduced in the name of “racial equity,” not to mention changes in academic standards at many public schools, or even just the risk of being videotaped or called a Karen for all the world to see if an everyday argument about dogs or parking spots or whatever escalates. Given all of that is it really irrational that some white people would want to live in a community where they don't have to fear such things? Most people are just trying to get through the day. 

What do you think about that, John? 

JOHN MCWHORTER: That's a tough question to be asked, because, I were a white person, certainly my patience with the idea of root causes and what your responsibility is in terms of “doing the work” would be severely tested by a situation like that. And I would imagine that if you lived in a neighborhood where it was white people who were behaving that way, who were making a ruckus and breaking the law and carjacking, et cetera, you'd still wanna get outta there.

It's not necessarily that you don't like black people. I'm not sure what we black people are saying about ourselves to imply that if you don't want to live in a dangerous neighborhood, you don't want to be around black people, as if it's inherent to blackness to be a dangerous person and that somehow white society deserves it or something like that. So I can imagine what that impatience would be. 

I openly will say that I think you can be a very concerned, very enlightened white person and yet decide that you don't want, physically, to be around that, that you don't want your children around that. I get it. I mean, even here in New York City, if there's somebody who's sleeping on the train, or often then waking up and demonstrating that they are not of sound mind or they're addicted to something—neither of those things are their fault. But if that person is doing that, that person in New York City is usually black. And it's at the point where I am becoming reluctant to bring my girls onto the train, not because of the danger of those guys but because I don't want them to internalize the idea that there's something default about blackness and being in that condition and, frankly, creating a nuisance on the subway.

I don't think that makes me a bigot, but I just don't want my children to form a certain picture. A white person might be concerned with things like that too. So yeah, I get it. Now, Scott Adams clearly was being willfully obnoxious. But if we're talking about this issue of do you wish to be in a neighborhood like that? Yeah, I can understand wanting to get away and feeling guilty that you're white and the people who are bothering you are black. But you know, you have to live a life. In real life, we're all buying groceries. That's what real life is. So yeah, I get it. 

Yeah. I guess I distinguish between my commonsense recognition that people are going to vote with their feet, and if they feel uncomfortable, they're gonna move. That's just the way of the world. I wouldn't have it any other way. I wouldn't have the government try to tell people where to live and where not to live, and so on. 

I want to distinguish between my acceptance of the fact that, when the incentives are such and the environment is such that people feel uncomfortable, they're gonna move, and the moral question, as you put it, about what are we obligated to do as decent citizens in terms of putting up with things that might be a little bit disquieting or uncomfortable in the interest of maintaining a kind of social solidarity or whatever. For example, people are committed—some—to sending their children to public schools and not opting for private or parochial education for their kids, even though they could afford to do so, because they want their kids to be a part of an education milieu that has all walks of life represented people from all different social classes and so on represented. They want their kids to know that not everybody was born with the advantages of middle-class status that they might, their family might, enjoy. And so they, in effect, sacrifice a little something in terms of comfort on behalf of a commitment to kind of social solidarity. They want their kids to be exposed to stuff that.

And I think there's something to that. I think racial integration of networks, of neighborhoods, of schools—other things equal—is to be sought after. Again, not by compulsion, but through a promotion of a norm or sort of ideal of good citizenship and notions of decent living. How do I live in society where there are inequalities and inequities and so on? And if I'm advantaged, maybe I shouldn't just run away and try to surround myself with other people who are advantaged. 

On the other hand the litany of fear of crime, of concern about being treated with disrespect, a feeling that the anti-racism mantra has marginalized white people in certain ways and has encouraged black people to behave toward them in ways that are that are disquieting and uncomfortable, and a person's feeling, “I don't have to put up with that. I can just move, I can move out from the city to the suburbs. I can move out from the coast to the vast middle of the country. I can move to Florida or Texas from California and find environments that are more congenial to myself.”

There's this guy, Bill Bishop is his name. He has a book called The Big Sort. Not to be confused with Michael Lewis's book on the financial crisis called The Big Short. The Big Sort. And he's basically saying that a lot of that is going on, a lot of relocation of people around the country, moving to places where they find raising their children to be a less onerous and hazardous proposition. That's not only racial. But it's gonna correlate with race because some of the places they're moving away from are going to have a large number of black people in them and some of the stuff that they're running from is gonna be, in many people's minds, associated with African American population.

So I think, to conclude, Scott Adams crudely and rudely gave voice to a phenomenon that I think we all have to take seriously. It's not just Marjorie Taylor Green up there shouting about we need a national divorce between the red and the blue. It's a lot of people—decent people, honorable people—confronted with a dilemma and having to make their way in the world. Each of us has to figure out how it is that we're gonna make our way in the world. And some of that involves choosing environments which are congenial. 

People are gonna do that. And I think that imposes a constraint on activists and advocates from Black Lives Matter on down to recognize that there are benefits and there are costs. If you take a posture that is so antagonistic that it gives people good reason to go for the exits, you have to reckon with what the day after they've gone for the exits look like. If you're running a big city like Chicago, I mean, it's one thing to say, “Crime is overblown. Tucker Carlson makes a big deal out of it every night. He's beating a dead horse. Crime is not the bugaboo that right-wingers make it out to be.” That that could well be true. It's another thing to say, “I don't give a damn what white people tell me, because they're all racist anyway. And the murder in our city is not happening in their neighborhoods. It's happening in black neighborhoods. Please don't tell me, white person, about how it is that I have a responsibility to deal with crime in my city.”

You can say that if you want to. That's an invitation to the tax-paying, middle-class, family-based center of your city to head for the exits. And then you're gonna have to deal with the consequences of that. 

It's interesting. There was a book about 20 years ago by Sheryll Cashin, and she's a black law professor. I think it had “integration” in the title? If I broke the fourth wall more, I would look, because I have it on a shelf somewhere in here. But she wrote a book, and it was a very interesting book. It was a very disturbing book, but very interesting. I think she's at Georgetown, or she used to be, and her thesis was that middle-class black people should not try to move to posh middle-class black communities, because as soon as a community like that is founded, poorer black people come along with them right next door anyway. And so you can't escape your poor black brethren. 

---

---

Excuse me, John, I just wanna mention book is called The Failures of Integration. 

That's it. Right. And I recommend it, although I disagreed with almost every page. She was saying that middle-class black people should stay in poor black communities and help out to avoid the process that William Julius Wilson demonstrated, which was that middle class black people move out of communities after segregation, and it leaves poor black people without role models. I've always been very skeptical of that argument, but it seems to have settled in as common wisdom. 

And the thing about Sheryll Cashin's book is that she actually said at one point—it's one of the most bizarre points I've ever seen made in a book, I'm surprised her editors didn't catch it, but I think she meant it. And it's kind of like what people mean when they say you should stay. And it could even be applied to white people, too. She says, “There are worse things than being shot.” She actually, with a straight face, writes, “You should stay.” And I'm thinking, are there? I don't think she's quite aware of the power of a gun. Maybe she thinks you just get a hurt leg or something. But she actually says there are worse things than being shot. The idea is that you should stay behind and suffer, that that's what the dutiful citizen does. And her point is, don't try to get away because the poor people are gonna come after you anyway. Weird, weird argument.

But I think that's where a lot of people feel that they're supposed to at least pay a kind of lip service to, that you're supposed to have a miserable life or deal with things like being shot as just collateral damage, because society isn't fair and you don't wanna be part of the system. But that's a tough one to get across to people as they're buying their groceries and raising their kids. I think it's a little utopian to think that people are gonna stay behind and deal with getting shot. It's tough.

You know, you're reminding me, speaking of books, of the great book by Anthony Lukas called Common Ground, about the school desegregation battle in Boston. The book is maybe 1990, something like that. But in any case, it's a history of the school desegregation, and part of it is centered around the story of a family, Colin and Joan Diver. I still remember their names, Colin and Joan Diver. They were Harvard-trained lawyers and they were liberals and Martin Luther King had been assassinated. The years is 1968. This is an Anthony Lukas's retrospective telling. And they decide to move from Newton or Lexington or one of the tony suburbs of Boston where they were living in their upper-middle-class comfort and buy a brownstone in the Back Bay of Boston, the South End of Boston, and move into the neighborhood and try to be a part of the solution to the problem of social inequality and turmoil that was afflicting both the city of Boston and the country as a whole at that time. 

And he chronicles in excruciating detail how the cold reality of what it means to live with people breaking into your garage, with hookers turning tricks in the backseat of cars parked around the corner from where your kids have to walk to to get to school, with drunks staggering down the avenue and insulting you as you go about your daily chores on a Saturday morning to buy your groceries, with loud music playing and when you ask the people to turn 'em down, they say, “Fuck you.” What it means to live there. They held out as long as they could, I don't know, two years, three years. And eventually they had to bite the bullet and follow Scott Adams's advice.

What was the last straw? 

I don't remember exactly what sent them over the edge. It might have been a physical assault or a break-in or the third break-in. But Sheryll Cashin is touching on a moral imperative that a lot of people feel: We shouldn't be a part of the problem. Let's not run from the problem. Let's dig in. Embrace it. Yes, it's uncomfortable. Yes, it may be costly. But Lukas's point in this poignant telling was that, I mean, are you gonna make your children pay the prices? It's one thing for you to say you gotta ante up and kick in in order to be a part of the solution, but you're gonna make your children pay that price? That's asking an awful lot. 

It is.

---