Dilbert artist’s book canned after he ‘identified as black’

AN UPCOMING book by the creator of the Dilbert comics has been cancelled after he referred to black Americans as a “hate group”.

Scott Adams’ self-help title Reframe Your Brain was dropped by Penguin Random House following the comments.

Mr Adams’ Dilbert comic strip – a chronicle of office life that was first published in 1989 – has also been dropped by major newspapers including including The Washington Post.

It comes after an episode of his Youtube show, Real Coffee with Scott Adams, in which the writer said: “If nearly half of all blacks are not OK with white people … that’s a hate group.

“I don’t want to have anything to do with them. And I would say, based on the current way things are going, the best advice I would give to white people is to get the hell away from black people … because there is no fixing this.”

His comments were made in response to a Rasmussen poll which found that 26pc of black respondents said they disagreed with the phrase “It’s OK to be white”, while 21pc said they did not know.

Writing later on Twitter, Mr Adams, who is white, said: “I’ve lost three careers to direct racism so far ... All three were perpetrated by White people for their own gain.

“No black person has ever discriminated against me. That’s partly why I identified as black for several years.

“White people in the media are also the main source of worsening race relations.”

Reframe Your Brain is about changing the way one thinks about potentially harmful things such as drinking alcohol, according to its blurb on the publisher’s website.

It says: “Reframes don’t need to be true. They don’t even need to be logical. They only need to work.”

A spokesman for Portfolio, Mr Adams’ Random House Penguin-owned publisher, declined to comment to The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story.

Billionaire Elon Musk came to Mr Adams’ defence on Twitter, claiming that the news media is “racist against whites”.

In a post that has since been deleted, Mr Musk wrote “What exactly are they complaining about?”, in response to a tweet by Mr Adam about media outlets pulling his Dilbert comic strip.

Mr Musk said in a separate post: “For a very long time, US media was racist against non-white people, now they’re racist against whites [and] asians.”