A KillerMovies.com message board post from 2004 may have unearthed Scott Adams’s penchant for unadulterated racism; Adams regularly places his AOL email address (scottadams@aol.com) on his own Dilbert comic strips. The AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) nicknames linked to Adams’s email address are anti-Black and anti-Asian.
When AOL released their Instant Messenger software several years ago, I downloaded it and tried it. It was ok, but what I found intriguing was that I could search for anybody else who was online the same time as me by simply putting in their email address and searching.
I thought it would be cool to search for celebrities whose email was public knowledge, and I knew that Scott Adams put his email address on his Dilbert comic strip every day (and still does), scottadams@aol.com.
So I searched for "scottadams@aol.com". What came back was both surprising and shocking. The software told me that there were 3 other AOL Instant Messenger nicknames registered under scottadams@aol.com's account.
Nickname #1: niggerape
Nickname #2: ura_****** (rhymes with "chigger"
Nickname #3: die_u_chink
I'm not making this up. I remember this clear as a bell for obvious reasons. So, I called AOL and discussed this with someone there. She pulled up the information just as I had, and sure enough, there it was. At first, she said that this must be some OTHER scott adams. I said, "no, there's only ONE scottadams@aol.com in the entire world." I mean, if there were more than one, how could the email be routed. No, there was no denying that this was, indeed, THE scott adams.
So, what next? Well, I emailed him. I presented to him what I had found, and inquired as to whether he had created these nicks under his account. Here is his response in its entirety:
"No, of course not."
That's it! No "Wow, thanks for bringing that to my attention", or any kind of reasonable explanation.
So, is Scott Adams a racist? Who knows? Maybe he is, maybe he isn't. But this is very strange.
By the way, I can't say as I have ever seen an African American depicted in any Dilbert strip.
There are some who dispute the legitimacy of searching for AOL Instant Messenger users by email, but there are also people who say that the AIM screen names strongly match with the email.
This may put Scott Adams’s recent anti-Black extremist rant in context.