Scott Adams Echoes White America’s Resentful History of “Helping” Others
Scott Adams, creator of the comic strip “Dilbert,” in Dublin, Calif., on Oct. 26, 2006. Photo: Marcio Jose Sanchez/AP
Ed.: we’re running this piece as a companion to our screening of “The Big Payback” on Mar. 27th. Sign up for that here!
For centuries, we’ve been assisting African Americans, Native Americans, Vietnamese people, and Iraqis and have never been thanked once.
by Jon Schwarz
WEDNESDAY’S PECULIAR YOUTUBE remarks by “Dilbert” cartoonist Scott Adams about Black Americans being a “hate group” have certainly received a lot of attention. Hundreds of newspapers across the U.S. have now dropped Adams’s strip.
What’s gotten almost no notice, however, is how Adams went on at length about his efforts to be “helpful to Black America.” But my ears perked up when I heard this, since the most berserk racial ultraviolence in U.S. history has always been accompanied by this kind of rhetoric from white Americans — i.e., we’ve done our best to help others, only for them to turn around and loathe us rather than respond with the gratitude we deserve for our openhearted kindness.
Here’s some of what Adams said on this subject:
Now here’s what white Americans have been saying for the past 400 years about Native Americans, African Americans, Vietnamese people, Iraqis, and many, many other people. See if you can spot a pattern.
The first seal of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, created after King Charles I granted the colony a charter in 1629, portrayed a Native American saying, “Come Over and Help Us.” Just eight years later, during the Pequot massacre, the men of Massachusetts helped about 500 women, children, and other civilians become dead.
By the early 1800s, white America had decided that we had to separate ourselves from the ungrateful wretches surrounding us. President Andrew Jackson began his famous 1830 speech to Congress with the happy news that “the benevolent policy of the government, steadily pursued for nearly 30 years, in relation to the removal of the Indians beyond the white settlements is approaching to a happy consummation.” This was all thanks to how nice we were. “The policy of the general government toward the red man,” said Jackson, “is not only liberal, but generous.”
The government’s benevolent policy had already been enacted by Jackson’s soldiers during the Creek War in 1814, when they removed strips of skin from their defeated enemies and made bridles for their horses out of them. Then, after Jackson’s speech, the government helped about 60,000 Native Americans experience the Trail of Tears.
It wasn’t too much later that President Teddy Roosevelt explained in his book “The Winning of the West” that “no other conquering and colonizing nation has ever treated the original savage owners of the soil with such generosity as has the United States.”
You might ask what the reaction of Indigenous people was to all this help. Sadly, there was just a total lack of appreciation. As the Rocky Mountain News pointed out, they were an “ungrateful race” that “ought to be wiped from the face of the earth.”