Are you making the world a better place right now by continuing to defend trolls who, by your own admission, cause (some) harm and make the world a worse place with their behavior?
I guarantee you that, with possible lone exceptions like your kid, high schoolers as a group are keenly aware of the gesture’s racist significance.
Fifteen years ago, he hasn’t done anything similar since then, and he isn’t my Prince anyway.
He was a stupid kid.
Well, currently I’m addressing the other type of behavior I described in my post:
So … yes, I am making the world a better place.
If you make a OK symbol, turn it upside down and put it at your belt, one thing I can be damned sure of is that you don’t mean “OK!”
Maybe you mean White Power, maybe you’re playing a prank, maybe you’re playing the circle game, but you’re not saying OK.
One person’s “trigger” is another person’s recognition of blatant racism that should be called out.
Part of the “prank” included them trying to spread the word that’s clapping in anti-feminist.
Sure, just realize that if you’re “calling out” mundane things like “It’s OK to be white” or the OK sign, you’re doing exactly what 4chan wants you to.
How can we tell if we’re playing into 4chan’s hands or if we’re calling out actual racists who are using the symbol unironically?
Do you have any reason to believe the students in question pictured in this yearbook are the former and not the latter?
I try to err on the side of not calling people racists without good evidence to suggest it’s the case. I don’t consider a picture of someone making the “OK” symbol, by itself, to be “good evidence”.
Do you know that the school is acting only on the OK symbol “by itself?”
Yes.
The sign is mostly agreed to mean “okay” and in the context of High Schoolers also as part of a game. A few have imposed another meaning upon it.
Two points here.
One you are simply wrong in your belief about how to interpret some code based on body position. From the linked article:
The pictures of those two both have them making a traditional up high “okay” sign, above the shoulder level. Still, the context is key and in that context the intent was clear: it was a white nationalist signifier.
Do you see a big difference between the first picture in my link that you say is inoffensive, and the third, which are widely agreed to have been racist gestures. (Because context is key.)
Now neither I nor you nor most of the students at this school know where the kid in photograph was holding his hand, caught in a candid playing the game, or giving an okay sign in answer to a question, or in a group photo. The student editors and their teacher mentors do know and at the time of putting the book together saw nothing offensive within the context.
And let’s be very clear: there is no accusation being made of any offensive intent. The decision to not distribute the yearbook is explained explicitly stating the decision is independent of, “regardless of intent”. No matter what the context and what the intent, no matter how benign, a gesture widely understood by most of the world, and perhaps more importantly, the overwhelming majority of the student community, to be of benign, albeit possibly goofy, meaning, being present in the yearbook means that there is some chance that someone will be offended, so all are to be denied their yearbooks.
White nationalists have claimed the numbers 88 and 14 as signifiers as well and in certain contexts that intent is clear. Should all math and history books in the school be pulled if they contain those numbers because in certain contexts they are of that meaning and someone might be offended?
All I have to go on is in the OP, which said that the school emailed the parents:
If the email also contained information that some of the kids making the gesture had also been dressing up in white masks and burning crosses, or were regular contributors to Stormfront or something along those lines, the OP left it out of the explanation, so AFAIK, the school is acting only on the OK symbol “by itself”. We’re getting all the information we have about it second- or third-hand, so we can’t claim certainty about much, but just like my erring on the side of not calling people racists without good evidence, we probably shouldn’t assume there’s more to the story when we don’t have any evidence at all to suggest there might be more, and we do have a snippet from an email from the school saying that it’s due to the OK symbol.
But you’ve got no problem assuming that people are “triggered.”
We’ve got 3 possibilities –
- The school administrators are easily triggered liberal snowflakes
- The school is simply making a slightly difference calculation and erring on the side of not giving racists a platform, even though they don’t suspect actual racism and fully understand the history and trollish nature of this “prank”
- There’s more to the story that we don’t know and the school is 1000% in the right
In only one of those cases are you making the world a better place by defending the trolls, and that’s by your own admission. That’s a swell calculus, you’ve made.
You can’t. Therefore, you must always assume racism.
We cannot afford to take chances. If some troll tells us something, we have to assume it is the God’s honest truth. Because, after all, how can you tell?
Regards,
Shodan
That’s a false dichotomy and you’re smart enough to know that.
Yeah! Someone might call you “triggered”. How could a man face himself in the mirror after such a powerful blow?
Boy howdy, is this ever the wrong place for you.
The Straight Dope, home of the “Smartest, Hippest”, is seemingly chock full of lily-white American people achingly desperate to call other lily-white American people Nazis, White Supremicists, Secret Klansmen, etc., etc., etc., while at the same time knowingly assuring themselves that even though America is a vile, bigoted, savage hellhole, the rest of the world is a peaceful, tranquil, racially-harmonious paradise, all because they once spent two whole weeks on vacation in Munich or Montreal.
It makes this decidedly non lily-white American grateful as Garcia that I am in a position to sit back and laugh at the self-righteousness while living less than 300 miles from 5 different countries, all but one of which actually LIKE America and Americans.
(although I really do like the beer and music threads here…;))
Destination on your left. >bing< You have arrived.
Or you think we are dumb enough not to.