Dumping ‘Dilbert’ comic strip is different from rewriting dead writers | Opinion

You’ve probably seen the news that The Sacramento Bee and all other McClatchy newspapers, along with a bunch of other outlets, are dumping the “Dilbert” comic strip after its creator, Scott Adams, called Black people “a racist hate group.”

Adams made this pronouncement after seeing a poll that said 26% of Black people who’d been asked whether they agreed with a phrase that’s been turned into a taunt and a T-shirt favored by white supremacists — “It’s OK to be white” — said no, they did not agree.

But instead of concluding that Black people who’d heard about this innocuous-sounding phrase being weaponized were not OK with that, Adams’ takeaway was that “the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from Black people.”

Predictably, Adams doesn’t like being held accountable and seems to think he’s being discriminated against by white people who hold racist views against white people. He also says that for several years, he identified as Black, I guess like that white former NAACP leader Rachel Dolezal, or the white history professor who also pretended to be Black.

“Dilbert has been canceled from all newspapers, websites, calendars, and books,” Adams tweeted, “because I gave some advice everyone agreed with.” Not everyone, Scott. And this isn’t canceling, but capitalism: We’re just no longer buying what you’re selling.

A lot more upsetting to me is the current attempt to rewrite history by rewriting Roald Dahl and Ian Fleming, who are no longer available for comment.

Both are being redacted in an attempt to remove all potentially offensive words, and though I never read Fleming’s Bond books and never liked Dahl’s psychedelic children’s stories, that offends me.

Why? You cannot credibly argue both that a) we need to come to terms with our real history rather than some airbrushed version of it and b) that we should try to erase all evidence of how unfortunate that history really was.

This isn’t censorship per se, because government isn’t imposing this purge.

But it is just as wrong as the right-wing attempts to make sure that no history lesson makes anybody feel bad.

Just as German children learn all about the Holocaust, which is a moral imperative, so too should our kids be exposed to both the unhappier racial chapters of our past and to unscrubbed literature; they can handle reading the word “fat,” I feel sure.

Otherwise, where does this end? I happen to enjoy 19th-century English literature, in which both anti-Catholic tropes and antisemitism are ubiquitous. But to remove the offensive passages would be to delude ourselves about what that world was like, and what our world grew out of.

Right now, I’m reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “The Crack-Up,” and though I’m only 60 pages in, the author has already made me queasy several times. First, there was his supposedly sex-positive announcement that “even rape often turns out well.” For whom, I wonder.

Then, there was this passage about how by 1928, the quality of Americans visiting Paris had fallen off, and become terribly subpar: “I remember a fat Jewess, inlaid with diamonds, who sat behind us at the Russian ballet and said as the curtain rose, “Thad’s luffly, dey ought to baint a bicture of it.” Ugh.

But do I think that Fitzgerald should be made presentable? Absolutely not.

The best-selling novelist Sara Paretsky, who created the female private detective V.I. Warshawski, posted this on Facebook the other day: “When I was young, my parents once had a bet on the exact wording of a passage from Shakespeare. Don’t ask me what I was seven, I didn’t really know what was going on. All I know is that my dad lost, which miffed him. He crossed out the passage in their ‘Complete Works of Shakespeare,’ and wrote in his version. Thinking you can write better than Bill takes some chutzpah.

“Even thinking you can — or should — write better than Roald Dahl is an affront to what he was doing as a writer and as a person (yes, I know he was unpleasantly antisemitic). If you haven’t heard about the bowdlerizing of Matilda, James and the Giant Peach, or the Chocolate Factory, you can look it up — language about fat people and people who wear wigs has apparently been scrubbed.

“However, àla Coca-Cola, Puffin are responding to the uproar by reprinting ‘Dahl Classic’ along with the more anodyne versions. I have written hurtful sentences, perhaps even full paragraphs that I wish I hadn’t. … But these are my mistakes, my flaws. I own them and they are as much a part of my work as the passages that leave readers feeling supported. If you’re around when my copyrights expire and I’m not — leave the text alone. Debate it, curse me, but don’t do a Dave Paretsky/Puffin Books on me.”

Don’t do one on anyone.

This story was originally published February 28, 2023 at 12:05 PM.