Context for the Scott Adams Story

Recently "Dilbert" cartoonist Scott Adams issued a rant saying he won't help black people because of a Rasmussen poll that found blacks did not agree with "It's OK to be white." But that "It's OK to be white" phrase is part of the racist backlash against blacks' civil rights.

From The Present Age

Excerpt: "Salon writer Amanda Marcotte delved this point further on Twitter: 

'Part of the problem is that if, hypothetically, someone flashed white supremacist symbols at the camera [like the 👌..."OK" sign] the point of the stunt would be to get liberals wound up, so they can then claim that liberals are just imagining things,' she wrote. 'That was what the OK symbol was literally invented to do: Both serve as a white supremacist symbol and also one that is just ordinary-enough looking that when liberals expressed outrage, the white supremacist could play the victim of liberal hysteria.'

'It’s okay to be white' is the very same thing. It’s something that, if you take it out of context, sounds harmless. If you’re familiar with the context, however, it quickly becomes something one would quite easily object to.'

"Imagine if the KKK adopted an unofficial slogan of 'Sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns for everyone.' If you were familiar with it, and 'sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns for everyone' had been associated with the Klan over a span of years, how would you answer the polling question, 'Do you agree or disagree with the following statement: sunshine, rainbows, and unicorns for everyone?' Good pollsters don’t try to trick people into saying they agree with slogans (if they wanted to ask about whether it’s okay for white people to exist, they could have done that, but they, instead, decided to take something that the Anti-Defamation League added to its Hate Symbols Database)

"And that, among many other reasons, is why Rasmussen is not a good pollster." ... and why it's disingenuous for Adams to ignore the context for that slogan.