It seems DC United fired a trainer for making the “OK” sign.
So I did a search, it seems a lot of groups have decided that the OK sign is hate speech. Further, they did it a few years ago without notifying me. Not that it matters. I avoid using it as it has an obscene meaning in Arabic.
So did you know that this was added to the things to be outraged about?
I’ve been aware of the supremacist meaning for a few years now, but I didn’t know that the Anti-Defamation League declared it a “hate symbol” in 2019.
Besides being inferior to the “Thumb Up” gesture, the “OK” gesture was also always subject to confusion with the “Little Bit” gesture, IMHO. So good riddance.
While obviously the OK hand gesture has a non-hate speach history and usage it’s pretty obvious when used in a white supremacist manner. Just look for people trying to sneak it into public photographs. It’s a dog whistle, one that is being exposed for what it is.
Pretty appalling to see that 4chan deliberately tried to make society fall for “the innocuous OK hand sign is actually racism!” - and society proceeded to do exactly that… fall for it.
Racists fell for it too, though.
The Venn diagram for “Racist Gestures” and “Gestures Racists Use to Identify Themselves as Racists” is a single circle.
My problem is that for me the thumbs up gesture is obscene too, specially when done with both hands simultaneously, so I am running out of options.
When used as a white supremacist symbol, I have only seen it with the three fingers pointing down. I think this will link to a picture of the accused and the gesture.
It is also seems to be placed next to the body, near the waist line, in a subtle manner.
The classic OK symbol is usually three finger up, shoulder height, well in front of the body.
Yes, I did. And I rarely make the gesture but I did so in the last year or two and felt like an ass afterwards. Context would indicate that I had no hurtful intent but it’s the potential to be misunderstood that causes my regret. I haven’t done it since but I bet I will do so again at some point in the future. I hope I both that no one is hurt when I err and that I am not judged too harshly.
I hope people who have adopted this symbol as a dog whistle that gives them some measure of plausible deniability are judged harshly for being the racists they are.
That and other gestures are not allowed in our district because they closely resemble “gang signing”.
What a great idea! Let’s have hate groups decide what kind of communication is permissible. They’ll eventually learn to behave better the more we let them control our lives.
I heard a few years ago that it is now interpreted as a hate symbol. I never use it and think declaring it a hate symbol is a way OTT.
The only time I know of when it is superior to the thumbs up sign is when you scuba dive, since thumbs up means “something is horribly wrong and I must get to the surface NOW” which is quite the opposite of what it usually means. In all other cases I agree that the OK sign is fully made obsolete by thumbs up.
How anyone can look at that picture and say ‘It’s just an OK! Why so woke?’ boggles my mind.
Unfortunately, that’s just kind of how language and communication works. Meanings accumulate based on how people use words and gestures, and if racists/bigots are using them to express racism and bigotry, those meanings will accumulate. There are probably hundreds of examples of such in history.
Hell, this is so common, that it’s a cliché at this point. “Hey, why can’t I say X anymore? What’s this new term Y they expect us to use now? What was wrong with X?” See: Colored > Negro > African-American > Black. There are other examples.
That’s not really what happened.
What happened was that racists started communicating using the OK sign to say: “I am racist - are you racist? Cool, you are! Let’s be racism buddies”. Obviously this only works if they both know that this is what the OK sign means to them, but thanks to the internet they could communicate this meaning ahead of time.
But eventually other people found out, because this coordination happened on public message boards like 4chan. And so the message went out: “this is a method thsy racists use to identify each other”.
Now, you can take that information, understand that if you flash an OK sign in the wrong context you may be mistaken for a racist, and do with that as you wish; or you can petulantly stomp your feet and whine about free speech and letting the racists control the dialog. Up to you. But no matter how much you protest, you will not change the way that human communication works.
When people use the OK sign in the manner shown in the above team photo, it’s always some racist asshole trying to be cute. Then they say ‘OMG I had no idea, it’s just an OK symbol, or it’s the Circle Game’, like we’re all jackasses.
He wasn’t fired for making the OK sign, he was fired for being a cutesy racist asshole fuckhead trying to troll the libs. Now he gets to have fun trolling the libs at his next job.
Obviously I don’t know his motives, but yeah, that’s a weird orientation for the OK gesture anyway.
However, there is this: The Circle Game | Know Your Meme
Absent any other context, I would have assumed the guy in the photo was playing that game.
Yep old news.
Here’s a thread from 2018 about it:
Corrected, because I misread your comment initially. It’s not the same thing at all. This has to do with reasonable preferences when describing certain people, Not that I agree with the way the evolution of those words, but with those words there was no harmful intent, and the effort was to take those words away from haters.
I understand that’s what happens. I’ve been warning about the way these people are looking for fellow haters for a very long time. But I still don’t like it, and there are ways to combat it besides letting the haters control us. For one thing, this should be a call for everybody to use the OK sign as much as possible where it’s use would be harmless taken in context, and at the same time pointing out how we’re taking back this expression before it can be subsumed by haters.