And yes, context matters. How many of these people are making this sign at a time/place where you’d expect them to be trying to communicate “I’m okay”? “I’m okay, I’m behind this reporter on live TV!” “I’m okay, I’m taking a group photo with my work associates.” Nope, unless everyone else is doing it as part of the group photo, the one guy is doing it to stand out.
Not many people recognized the prior use of a swastika before the Nazis took a variation of it as their own. Hitler mustaches always looked stupid, and still do when a former basketball star that isn’t seriously considered a Nazi is sporting one. If common harmless expressions are taken over by haters it’s our own fault if we let them.
Like the word patriot the meaning has been coöpted and distorted beyond all normal use.
Not to mention flags. These days, any time I see someone other than the government flying a Canadian flag, I have to stop and ask if they’re a racist jerk.
Next thing you know, people will come after pineapples and pink flamingos.
Yes, thanks to Buckwheat, I think of it as the “o-tay hand gesture.”
A collection of hate symbols identified by the Anti-Defamation League:
HTML version: https://www.adl.org/resources/hate-symbols/search
PDF version: https://www.adl.org/sites/default/files/ADL%20Hate%20on%20Display%20Printable_0.pdf
In several of the hand gestures, three consecutive fingers are extended, although others have two or four fingers. In the film Mississippi Burning, there’s a scene involving a photo in which some men are posing with their thumbs hooked in their belts and three extended fingers pointing downward. Gene Hackman’s character says it’s a KKK symbol. I’ve had a look online and haven’t found anything that confirms this. Of course, it’s just a movie, but it may also be something that’s fallen into disuse.
There was a brilliant Bloom County strip some years ago, where the young man in the strip (don’t remember his name) was trying to teach his bigoted/ignorant mother about the currently accepted terminology. They went from ‘colored people’ to ‘negro’ and so on all the way to ‘people of color.’ And in the last frame she took it back to ‘colored people’ because she couldn’t see the difference.
Only several hundred million or so.
I see the swastika all the time around here in the context of Hindu rituals. Often enough that it’s the first thing I think of when I see a normal swastika (not rotated.)
Several hundred million Hindus, but it shows up in a lot of cultures. No surprise-- It’s a shape that’s both simple and visually interesting. Swastikas have been found in ancient Hopewell burials. There are swastikas tiled into the floor of my (over a century old) Catholic church. I wouldn’t be surprised to see them show up in any given culture, from before the Nazis.
And all over the world. Not just Hindus, either, Buddhists and several North American indigenous tribes used it as a common element in their designs, and several North American sports teams co-opted that use (pre-WW2).
Swastikas were even common as good luck symbols here in the US prior to WWII. It was a common decorative motif for clothing and jewelry and used in architecture as well.
(All from the Cleveland Plain Dealer in one month of 1907)
The Nazis changed it. True, it’s was a shape known by a lot of people, in many different forms, throughout the ages since it’s a relatively simple geometric pattern, but most of the people who saw it used as Nazi symbol initially did not recognize it’s use elsewhere, and then largely did nothing about it until it was entrenched as a evil symbol. Which is my point, these things can be stopped if people don’t simply cave to the haters. You know how it goes, first they came for my OK sign…
But people still use the swastika in the proper context all the time.
But how often in normal life do you even use this? Are you going to start running around finding excuses to use it more? How are you going to explain your sudden over-use of the okay symbol to those who start noticing you use it way more than other people?
Changing your behavior to “swamp” the racists is still changing your behavior because of the racists.
And can you even swamp them? They don’t need an excuse to throw it in somewhere, because their whole point is to swamp normal life with racist calls to racist actions. They want minorities to see it everywhere, so that they don’t feel safe anywhere. There’s no way you could match that, without looking kind of insane.
Very similar to what the Right wing in the US did with “woke”. Notice how many times the meanings used by the black community are the ones that get to be turned into slurs by the bigots.
Would you wear one on the streets of Chicago with no other context? Even in the non-rotated or reversed form? It’s too late now for that. Should we allow the OK sign to end up the same way?
I can’t do it alone. I don’t expect any one individual to fight back, but there are more of us than them, at least now and in this place.
And yes, I will change my behavior because of racists because pacifism doesn’t work. No one is the least bit safer as a result of haters co-opting this symbol for their own use. That simply empowers them. And we can deprive them of this symbol if we put the effort in.
I wouldn’t shoot you an OK sign with no context either, but I can still use it in appropriate contexts. I’m not particularly worried about any of this.