> Dave is hired merely as an act of workplace tokenism before wrapping up with what appears to be an attempt at a thinly-veiled transphobic joke.
That particular strip is actually a hilarious joke that is probably lost on people who have never been in the position of being the minority who isn’t meeting expectations for “adding diversity.” It’s not directed to trans people at all, but rather pokes fun at some people’s rigid notions of race (it’s defined by how other people perceive you) in contrast with their fluid notions of gender (it’s defined by how you perceive yourself).
It’s not even an unusual thing. Do my kids identify as white, like their mom, or “brown,” like me? It shouldn’t matter, but in the progressive world view it does.
The problem is that progressives, like racist conservatives, don’t see race as only skin deep and attach a bunch of other social and political stuff to it. So whole “identifying as a different race” makes no sense from a traditional liberal view, it is almost a necessary concept within the progressive worldview.
I didn’t say that. My point is that race is to a much greater degree a fluid and socially defined construct than gender. And Adams is “obviously” making a joke at the expense of white people on positions of power who view them in the exact opposite way.
The joke is mocking the beliefs of the managerial class. That’s Adams’ whole shtick. In this case his mocking the contradiction in how ideologies ascendant among the managerial class view the fluidity of race versus gender.
The point of this article is that the casual conventional wisdom is that Adams' whole schtick is mocking the beliefs of managers, when in fact Adams is a much more complicated figure who also non-ironically believes we should be preemptively murdering teenaged males who appear to be on the autism spectrum in order to prevent mass shootings.
The article points out that Adams deeply warped personal beliefs have thus far not overtly made it into the comic strip, but not only have they now (with this strip as an example), but Adams himself is bragging about it on Twitter.
So: no, the joke here is not simply about mocking the beliefs of the managerial class. It's the "identify as an attack helicopter" joke, as a preceding comment correctly observed.
Lots of people say nutty things on Twitter these days—should read Larry Tribe’s recently. Who knows what’s truth and fiction on that site. But I don’t see the basis for reading the comic the way you do based on that tweet. They have nothing in common.
Your reading of the comic makes no sense. What is the punchline of the comic in your reading, that Black people can’t become white by self identification in the same way they can’t become an attack helicopter? That’s clearly not the joke.
I get what you're trying to say here, but you cannot reasonably make this point, since Adams is on Twitter talking about how his intent is to keep making his comic more and more transgressive until he's canceled.
Just a note that the comment I replied to was edited (I think the second paragraph was added?) after my comment was written. That's fine, I fiddle with my own comments all the time, but if the thread reads funny now, that's why. I'm happy to be done talking about Scott Adams for now.
The helicopter joke cruelly and flippantly dismisses the feelings and distress felt by trans people. That’s not what’s going on in the Dilbert strip. The punchline isn’t “it’s ridiculous for a minority to identify as white.” The butt of the joke is instead the white boss, who wants the minority employee to fit into a socially constructed identity for “diverse” people.
And mocking the Judith Butler theories embraced by mostly white progressives isn’t the same as attacking the disadvantaged groups that white progressives like to use as shields.
That particular strip is actually a hilarious joke that is probably lost on people who have never been in the position of being the minority who isn’t meeting expectations for “adding diversity.” It’s not directed to trans people at all, but rather pokes fun at some people’s rigid notions of race (it’s defined by how other people perceive you) in contrast with their fluid notions of gender (it’s defined by how you perceive yourself).