Watching someone blow up a successful global career of many decades in a single video is a startling sight, particularly when it is done deliberately. The career in question belonged to Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams, who recently broadcast what has been dubbed a ‘racist rant’ urging whites to stay away from blacks, a ‘hate group’. He was immediately cancelled, his cartoons dropped by hundreds of newspapers, while book publishers and distributors backed out of deals and his reputation was shredded in the highest pulpits in medialand. All this was predictable, so why do it?

Having followed him for a decade, I knew him as a sophisticated, often mischievous but insightful provocateur by trade, so I wondered what his game was. Adams’ comments came off a Rasmussen poll which found 26 per cent of blacks said it was not ok to be white, and a further 21 per cent were unsure. Further, Adams had previously identified as black, ‘because he wanted to be on the winning side’, and said he’d supported Black Lives Matter, reparations and other black issues. The row went viral for days on Twitter, a big discussion ensued about anti-white racism, and memes of black attacks on whites now bore a Dilbert picture.

It is Adams’ style to throw a stinking pig’s head on a formal dining table, and explain himself later amid all the uproar. Attention provides a fulcrum for changing views and he loves attention. He knowingly drew too much from one poll of 1,000 people, but as he later said, it reflected his experience and observations. He was too provocative in his wording, smearing a group with the opinions of a section; however, he had always held that you treat individuals as you find them. He was unconcerned by the vaporisation of as much as 80 per cent of his income, having long ago said he has ‘FU money’. Newspapers are a dying medium, and Dilbert has now been reborn via a channel where Adams gets the money. He says he is more popular and supported than ever, and the only people who cancelled him in the end were white Democrats.

So what, if anything, was achieved? He now says his endgame was to highlight toxic media narratives, which are priming people to be racist. Both blacks and whites are victims of this poisoning by media narrative. Long a critic of fake news and debunker of media hoaxes, he said the legacy media started serious race-baiting after the 2012 Trayvon Martin shooting, finding it a profitable source of clicks. He pointed to a long-running Gallup poll on US race relations which held steady from 2001 until 2013, when it started crashing. In 2001 62 per cent of white adults saw race relations as good, now it’s 43 per cent; among blacks it has halved, from 70 per cent to 33 per cent. The evidence is on our TV screens most nights

The brouhaha, however, unearthed some fascinating research. The American National Election Study is the country’s oldest continuous series of survey data investigating electoral behaviour and attitudes, dating back to 1948; it is dry and academic. But it polls how racial groups rate each other, and in its 2020 Time Series Study whites come out on the side of the angels, rating whites, blacks, Hispanics and Asians virtually equally on a feelings thermometer. Blacks, Hispanics and Asians all strongly preference their own racial group above all others, but whites do not. Moreover, all three racial groups put whites below all others. Lest you dismiss this as just another poll, it’s a long, written questionnaire of 7,000 to 8,000 US voters, and while it says nothing about individual attitudes, it carries weight in respect of groups.

Wading into these contentious waters is race and sex researcher, Illinois State University professor L. J. Zigerell, who said 50 per cent of whites rated the other racial groups equally, while only around 30 to 35 per cent of the other races did. He further says that while white conservatives still favour their own tribe just as other racial groups do, white ‘liberals’ increasingly favour ‘outgroups’, or other racial groups, over their own race. In other words, it’s white Leftists who are out of love with whites. All racial communities have their disputes and factions, but only white Leftists, in the ANES data, have decided to hate their own race. In a web chat Zigerell answered a commenter who queried if ‘the biggest racists in the US are groups other than white people’; Zigerell preferred the terms racial favouring or racial bias over racism, but didn’t demur further.

Manhattan Institute ‘Wokeness Studies’ sociologist, Zach Goldberg, further fleshes out the ANES data. 2016 was the year when white Leftists started rating non-whites more warmly than whites, he says, and by 2020 white Leftists (but not moderates or conservatives) saw whites as more violent and lazy and less intelligent than blacks. To quote Goldberg: ‘Very liberal’ (whites) now rate racial/ethnic minorities nearly 22 (!) points more warmly than they do whites’.

This is academic support for what we all saw with Hillary’s ‘deplorables’ comment, slurs about ‘smelly Walmart people’ and what seems to be a rising tide of anti-white racism evident in the media, in schools (Critical Race Theory, race quotas, diversity hires) and other institutions in the West. Anti-white stories and headlines are permitted by the powers-that-be, but woe betide if, Dilbert-like, you attack the wrong group. Whereas anti-black incidents such as the George Floyd killing or the Jussie Smollett hoax create wall-to-wall media coverage, every other day we see a steady but low-key stream of racial animus against whites. Twitter lit up recently with black kids beating up a white girl on a bus.

This week an Ohio video shows black kids beating up a 12-year-old white boy at school to make him support BLM; the Daily Mail is running a report about a black Staten Island educator vowing to get rid of white principals. ANES data says whites are the least tribal race, but under this pummeling, for how long?

This recent history has lessons for Australians as we ponder a vote on the Voice. Racism of all sorts should be condemned, and no one group or skin colour privileged above others. Unity, not disharmony, is what we must aim for. But racial views are flexible and, we see, easily inflamed. Emphasising and privileging racial differences seems designed to promote friction rather than unity.