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Critics are complaining that “Dave,” the new black character in the Dilbert cartoon strip, is “anti-trans” because he “identifies” as white.

I'm still not cancelled? Day 2.

Identify Any Way You Want https://t.co/FhW87gNNxh via Dilbert_Daily

— Scott Adams (ScottAdamsSays) May 3, 2022

Dave's Urban Culture
https://t.co/Ui0pw1Dcom via Dilbert_Daily

— Scott Adams (ScottAdamsSays) May 6, 2022

Scott Adams, the creator of Dilbert, had previously explained on his daily broadcast and on Twitter that he had not included a black character in the comic strip before because every character must have a personality flaw, and he feared being accused of racism.

There are no black people in the strip because all of my characters require personality flaws to make them funny. My black readers called me racist for including Asok (from India) in the strip. His only flaw is that he's young.

— Scott Adams (ScottAdamsSays) January 30, 2018

After floating the idea of asking left-wing black writer Ta-Nehisi Coates — who is also involved in the comic book industry — to help develop a black character, Adams tried crowdsourcing ideas for a black character by asking black artists for help:

Challenge for Black American cartoonists: Design a Black character to include in the Dilbert cast and paste into comments. Must be similar to my existing style and easy for me to reproduce. And you MUST specify the humorous character flaw that every comic character displays.

— Scott Adams (ScottAdamsSays) April 6, 2022

Ultimately, Adams decided to introduce a character whose one “flaw” was that he identifies as white — and that it would be unclear, both to readers and to fellow characters, whether he was serious, or whether he was simply mocking management.

“Dave” appeared this week for the first time, but was blocked by a major newspaper group, which refused to run the strip:

I just learned that a newspaper group won’t run my upcoming comic strip that introduces the first Black character (Dave) to the Dilbertverse.

— Scott Adams (ScottAdamsSays) April 28, 2022 https://twitter.com/swimmerbr78/status/ ... 3042095105

However, the objection to “Dave” was not that he was a racist character, but rather that he was transphobic. The comic strip itself did not mention transgender issues at all; the objection was that Dave seemed to make “identification” seem absurd.

Where to even start with this? The fact that Adams thinks waiting thirty-three years to introduce his first Black character could be viewed as anything but an embarrassment for him? Or maybe it’s that the way he chose to promote this strip from his personal account was by tweeting “Let’s see if the world is ready for this” and predicting he would get “cancelled” over it, giving a clear indication that his intention all along was to try to court controversy.

“Dilbert” creator [Scott Adams] introduces first black character in 33-year run, introduced solely to hate trans people