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In a text message to the outlet, Adams - who grew up in Greene County in the town of Windham and now lives in California - said, “I shook the box intentionally. I did not realize how hard I shook it.”
The remarks came after newspapers across the country dropped his popular comic series following Adams’ controversial comments in a Feb. 22 episode on his YouTube channel, “Real Coffee with Scott Adams.”
In the video, Adams, age 65, was discussing a Rasmussen poll that asked respondents whether they agreed with the statement, “It’s OK to be white.” The poll found that 26 percent of Black Americans disagreed with the statement.
“If nearly half of all Blacks are not OK with White people … that’s a hate group,” Adams says in the video. “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.”
In the days following the video’s release, several big papers, including The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times, announced that they would no longer carry "Dilbert." Scores of others followed suit.
On Sunday, Feb. 26, Andrews McMeel Universal, the comic’s distributor, announced that it was cutting all ties with Adams.
“As a media and communications company, AMU values free speech,” the company said in a statement. “We are proud to promote and share many different voices and perspectives. But we will never support any commentary rooted in discrimination or hate.
"Recent comments by Scott Adams regarding race and race relations do not align with our core values as a company.”
Responding to questions from The Post, Adams refused to apologize, insisting that his comments were intended to be hyperbole and claiming to disavow racism, the outlet reports.
In a subsequent YouTube video post on Saturday, Feb. 25, Adams said he had likely destroyed his reputation for the rest of his life.
“Most of my income will be gone by next week,” he said. “You can’t come back from this, am I right? There’s no way you can come back from this.”
First published in 1989, Dilbert centers around the titular character and his time working in a white-collar, micromanaged office. The comic strip has appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers in 65 countries and 25 languages.
The son of a postal clerk and a real estate agent, Adams was high school valedictorian in Greene County before receiving a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics at Hartwick College in Oneonta. He then earned an MBA at the University of California at Berkeley.
He worked in banking, advancing from a position as a teller to product manager, and as a budget and financial analyst at Pacific Bell.
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