It may have been made up, but I'm willing to bet that a not insignificant portion of people who are _now_ making it aren't doing so to make a point of saying "everything is just fine".
My town had an issue with a cop posing out with a bunch of 3%ers at their gun store. This is in the PNW, and the owner of the store, born and raised in the PNW, has a Confederate flag neck tattoo. This was during some street protests.
People can't credulously claim that the half dozen or so people there were all making an "OK" sign then, completely naively, "hey, all good, we're safe, just guarding our gun store". Or maybe they were just making an in joke based on the SCUBA store next door?
This is the first time I've heard of that. I can just imagine being somewhere loud and giving the ok / perfect symbol to a friend across the room and then being called a racist.
If that's what you got out of this, I'm not sure what to say.
I even used the SCUBA shop, which is next door, for reference.
No-one that I've seen has advocated that the OK sign be abandoned for divers. I've been mid mouthful at a restaurant when a server has asked how my food is and I've made this sign and not been called a racist.
However, should I and half a dozen of my buddies, armed an in full tactical gear, standing 10 ft from a BLM protest, waving my Confederate flags, all choose to make this sign for a photo, then a _reasonable person_ may choose to interpret this as "we know exactly what we're implying here, and we're not all just telling the cameraman that "everything is perfect"."
>However, should I and half a dozen of my buddies, armed an in full tactical gear, standing 10 ft from a BLM protest, waving my Confederate flags, all choose to make this sign for a photo, then a _reasonable person_ may choose to interpret this as "we know exactly what we're implying here, and we're not all just telling the cameraman that "everything is perfect"."
yeah, but that's the story required for your credulity.
another 'reasonable person' with an axe to grind could have a much more minimal story required for credulity, say someone resting their hand outside the window of their car, tweet the photo with a license plate, and ruin someones life.
my meaning : don't expect your reasonable demeanor is going to be the same as some other random bystanders' 'reasonable demeanor'.
I understood your underlying point immediately. There's no shortage of people actively seeking to be offended by something. Add an out of context image grab and a clickbait title and you can be the next viral enemy of the internet in a few hours.
A bloke (and a less privileged bloke at that, 75% non white according to himself) was recently fired because someone had shot a photo of him resting his hand out the window of a company truck in what lpoked line an OK hand.
It was discussed here a few days ago. Stop firing the innocent or something, from the Atlantic.
oh, come on. "resting his hand ... what looked like" ???
Wasn't the story that people in another car taunted him and urged him to make the symbol, and they recorded it when he did? He may have not known what the meaning was (I believe that is what he claimed) but that is an entirely different defense to make than "I wasn't doing it, it just looked a bit like it".
Point is it seems he did it after they kept following him and trying to get him to do it, it seems the guys in the other car even did it first to try to get him to mimic it.
And that is before we talk about the problem with firing someone over this in the first place.
Context is important.
I have had to tell my kids more than once that when an elderly person use their middle finger to point at something it isn't offensive because they grew up in a time when it didn't matter. That elderly person sure doesn't mean "F* you" as they are pointing their middle finger horizontally towards something while saying "look there".
In fact I think we all do something every single day that would be considered offensive by someone at some point.
The person who took the video went to significant effort to ruin Emmanuel Cafferty’s life and it is a great shame that he has suffered no consequences from doing so.
>NBC 7 spoke to the man who originally posted the picture on Twitter. He has since deleted his account and said he may have gotten "spun up" about the interaction and misinterpreted it. He says he never intended for Cafferty to lose his job.
but things can change to make the OK sign tabu too, can't they?
We are saying that if you use a potentially racist sign (hand OK) in real life it's not a big deal, since you're not using it in conjunction with other racist stuff.
At the same time you cannot use another potentially racist sign (the confederate flag), even if you were just trying to make a videogame version of "The Dukes of Hazzard" and are not trying to associate it with white supremacists.
I mean, I assume the confederare flag was not too problematic at some point, but now it is, so likely the OK sign will become problematic too.
Think of the "pepe" meme, which is now an alt-right thing and can't be used anymore in a neutral way!
So all racists have to do is adopt something as a “inside” symbol, then publicly advertise its “real” meaning, and everyone rushes to avoid it no matter how common it is.
I could see white supremecists doing this for fun.
Amusingly, given the starting point for this discussion, what you've described part of how the "OK" sign became associated with racism. In 2017, someone on 4chan's /pol/ board suggested "Operation O-KKK": flood Twitter etc with warnings about the supposedly racist meaning of the "OK" gesture. The initial target of the hoax was the regular "are you all right?" sign, but the inverted "circle game" version came under fire as well. Later, after the hoax had run its course, those who are wont to "own the libs" used it ironically as a joke. Time passes, only the most dedicated continue to use it, and its meaning becomes less a farce and more a serious signal.
(There is a similar, earlier sign used by a milita group called the "Three Percenters", but that was not the source of the spread. They are an extreme libertarian group, not a white supremacy one. Though one can imagine some overlap. Their hand sign became so closely associated with white supremacy partially because of the 4chan hoax.)
> Think of the "pepe" meme, which is now an alt-right thing and can't be used anymore in a neutral way!
MonkaS dude.
Pepe is fine, even the group that classified it as a hate symbol weren't referring to general usage.
One group of people I watch on Twitch use it all the time in the way it's meant to be used. As a very expressive cartoon frog that can convey emotions extremely succinctly.
And before you assume they're all closet neo-nazis: this group includes members who stopped streaming for about a month after Trump was elected, who frequently talk about eating the rich, and most recently they just ran a charity drive across multiple channels to raise money for BLM.
Context is key here. Lookup racist pepe images, and compare them to a picture of a sad/happy/etc cartoon frog. You won't have much difficulty telling the difference.
That won't happen; context matters. If you're posing with the confederate flag and a bunch of guns during a BLM protest, and flashing the OK hand symbol, it's going to be taken very differently from just using that same gesture to a friend in a random grocery store or something.
My wife is a high school teacher and, until we had our first child, was also the swim team coach.
Early last year she made a kid run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs.
Then she gets an angry text message from the kid's mother who believed her son was being punished specifically for making the "ok" symbol. This woman had found a picture of my wife on Facebook where she can be seen pulling her shirt down by pinching the bottom of it between her thumb and pointer finger, inadvertently making the "ok" symbol. She basically said she was going to put my wife on blast and out her as a racist. Ridiculous (Hilarious, even, in retrospect).
My wife didn't respond, of course. She immediately looped in her admin and explained what was going on. Fortunately that was the end of it, but it's not hard to imagine someone getting caught up in a similar situation and it becoming a full on witch hunt.
> My wife didn't respond, of course. She immediately looped in her admin and explained what was going on. Fortunately that was the end of it, but it's not hard to imagine someone getting caught up in a similar situation and it becoming a full on witch hunt.
Well, the hunt began when your wife made a kid run laps because he made an OK sign on his leg because he thought that was a 'cool' thing to do comparable to giving the person in front of you 'rabbit ears' by making a V-sign behind their head, not when that kid's mother started social media dumpster diving for 'evidence' to use against your wife. The way to avoid these witch hunts is to avoid starting them, not to make the first step and then complain when others follow suit. She could have taken the kid aside and asked him why he made that sign, he probably would have replied he got it off the 'net or from his friends who made him think it was 'cool'. She then could have told him why it is not cool, i.e. that him making that sign would be interpreted by some as him being a supporter of a nefarious ideology. By singling him out to run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs she more or less handed that kid's mother all the ammunition she needed to follow in pursuit.
In Dutch there is a saying which applies to this; "Wat gij niet wilt dat u geschiedt, doet dat ook een ander niet", it translates to "Do not do unto others what you do not want to have done upon yourself".
> The way to avoid these witch hunts is to avoid starting them, not to make the first step and then complain when others follow suit. She could have taken the kid aside and asked him why he made that sign, he probably would have replied he got it off the 'net or from his friends who made him think it was 'cool'. She then could have told him why it is not cool, i.e. that him making that sign would be interpreted by some as him being a supporter of a nefarious ideology. By singling him out to run laps after he low key photo-bombed the team picture by making the "Ok" symbol on one of his thighs she more or less handed that kid's mother all the ammunition she needed to follow in pursuit.
I don't get this - it was clearly a summary of events. The only detail you really have to go on is "after". How you can assume all of this somehow went down without any talking-to or explanation is beyond me. Even so, the admin would probably have said the same at the time.
She basically said she was going to put my wife on blast and out her as a racist. Ridiculous (Hilarious, even, in retrospect).
My wife didn't respond, of course. She immediately looped in her admin
Sorry, but as others have said your wife is the bad guy in this story. She abused her authority and bullied a kid, then had an “oh shit” moment, as all bullies do, when someone stands up to them. She is lucky that that kids mother is a better person than her and let her off with a warning.
I honestly don't know what the 'ok symbol' is in relation to racism/whatever. In my country I don't think it is a thing and I stopped following silly things on the internet. BUT even if it is a racist symbol/white supremacy/whatever, your wife is still in the wrong. (I am assuming the symbol is not illegal)
Your wife punished a kid for making a symbol she disagrees with, heck, you could even say by making a political statement. If that happened to my kid I would probably go after you as well (not in social media, but with a formal complain to the school to get you punished).
If he wore a MAGA hat would she made him run laps? What about a BLM tshirt? Rainbow pin?
It is not her job to punish someone she disagrees with. She can talk with him and explain what the symbol means and let the kid make his own conclusion, but she can't, and shouldn't punish a kid for disagreeing with him. (which I think is the reason we are now in this place in the world, where you either agree with everything I defend or you are a racist/fascist, or if you are from the other side, you are a communist hippie skyflower)
In the US, showing the ok symbol, usually upside down, is a kid's game. If an American child shows that to you below their waist, and you witness it, then they have 'earned' the right to punch your shoulder. That kid probably punched his whole class.
I remember from back when I picked up Norwegian litterature, a short story or essay or something that ended with something along the lines of: "cucumbers is the only thing that hasn't been deemed unhealthy yet. Hurry up and eat cucumbers while they are still healthy!"
> It may have been made up, but I'm willing to bet that a not insignificant portion of people who are _now_ making it aren't doing so to make a point of saying "everything is just fine".
Absolutely. But the corollary is that every time someone claims that something (a flag, a gesture, a tradition) is racist, then it actually transforms it into something racist. Because at that point you're forced to abandon it or consciously make a statement that you don't care about being considered racist.
If next year someone comes up saying that Santa Claus is racist, then dressing as Santa Claus becomes a statement, that you want it or not. This is a huge power that is easily abused.
Note that all symbols are their meaning are made up. To say "this gesture is a symbol of X" is to say "people made up that this gesture is a symbol of X."
It's a really odd social phenomenon. It's one thing to say "We don't like X and find it in poor taste. Please don't do that"
I don't like it when folks say such things, but I understand it. Instead, what many folks seem to be saying is that based on one thing they can tell what the person is like inside. It's an amazingly-broad generalization and people seem to be enormously confident of themselves when they make it. I can look at your shoe or color of your shirt and conclude that you are a bad person inside.
I don't find that to be especially rational, but what is one to do?
Read about the Bloods and Crips in the '80's, '90's. Schools were banning wearing red and blue because those gangs had hijacked those two colors. Anyone not in those gangs would take care to not wear anything containing those colors.
The op is not wrong for supposing it's possible for someone to be targeted due to wearing "shoe or shirt color".
This is also a difficult distinction to draw these days because white supremacist groups specifically choose coded symbols in order to publicly display their allegiance while maintaining plausible deniability. I think it's tricky to say anyone who makes the "OK" symbol is a racist because there's a long-standing meaning to that symbol that isn't racist, but on some level the same can be said of the numbers "14" or "88" which are more clearly tied to white supremacy. White supremacists count on the fact that, on the surface, no reasonable person can say that using these symbols makes you a racist. Because this is an explicit strategy to grow their numbers while keeping "normies" in the dark, I think it's important to view things like this in that context. Is it possible someone did something innocent and accidentally used a covert symbol of racism? Absolutely. But when you see repetitive uses of those symbols or a person has a long backlog of questionable actions and comments, at some point you have to draw a line.
I have a pet theory that this resonates with people that enjoy the simplicity of the puritanical thought patterns and approaches being taken by the (far?) left. Unsurprisingly it fits the terse, inflammatory nature of twitter to the T. I cannot relate with it.
I think the political side isn't even important. A lot of the behavioral patterns we see in the social justice left is what we saw with the religious right a few decades ago. I'd say it's more about adopting popular values from people around you without understanding why these values are important. It's very much like religion in this sense.
We're really just talking about deliberate communication here, and like with all communication, context is important. In general, the color of someone's clothes isn't communicating much, but it might be at a sporting event.
If you're flashing an "OK" sign in clear view, I would understand that to mean things are okay. If you're flashing the sign below the waist so very few people would notice, I would understand that to mean "I'm giving this sign to very few people and only those in that community would understand what I'm saying".
Generally, flashing that sign below the waist is a juvenile game where if one's friend sees the sign, one is entitled to punch them in the genitals (or something to that effect). That would be my first assumption before any kind of racism.
I suppose that’s pretty reasonable, but from what I have seen causing trouble from people, I really don’t believe that your view is shared by the majority of people causing the outlast against these symbols. I think either already, or in the near future, when someone makes an innocuous OK symbol, it will simply be interpreted as a symbol they are an even worse and more blatant racist, how dare they.
> It is from these Minutemen where the 3% name originated. It is a rough estimate that only 3% of the colonists were actively fighting in the field against British forces at any given time.
But you see the issue with that thought process right? You can imbue political meaning on anything that way, and ban arbitrary things. What if there is a (perhaps bogus) polemic, and your favorite singer is singled out as a racist/misogynist/communist/whatever, and the Bad People start blasting his songs at rallies? Are you supposed to stop listening to your favourite songs.
Come to your own conclusions, but mine is: fuck that - I'll be the judge of what is acceptable and what isn't, not some kind of thought mob.
Your conclusion here is that these people were all making this sign for non-nefarious meanings.
On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner. They _themselves_ were choosing to imbue political meaning on it, as much as anyone was choosing to _take_ meaning from it.
>On the contrary, it is contextually highly/entirely likely that they were _actively_ choosing to use it in a political manner.
Based on what? If you go looking for things with a specific interpretation in mind you're going to find a lot of it even in places that it wasn't meant that way. The adage about malice and incompetence comes to mind.
Based on the fact that a group of eight or so people with Confederate flags, tattoos and armed and wearing body armor went out of their way to pose, in front of a BLM protest, all making that sign.
"wasn't meant that way" - you're going have to try harder than that. Saying "oh, they meant nothing inflammatory, even though they're the group (3%ers) who are most associated with the nefarious intent and are absolutely aware of it's purported meaning" is wilfully disingenuous.
My town had an issue with a cop posing out with a bunch of 3%ers at their gun store. This is in the PNW, and the owner of the store, born and raised in the PNW, has a Confederate flag neck tattoo. This was during some street protests.
People can't credulously claim that the half dozen or so people there were all making an "OK" sign then, completely naively, "hey, all good, we're safe, just guarding our gun store". Or maybe they were just making an in joke based on the SCUBA store next door?