Unless, of course, we change the rules.Marilyn Monroe is often held up as the antidote to the idea that only thin can be beautiful. There’s no way to know for sure what it all means, is there? For now, looking at the hand means suffering whatever blows come from looking. Seems kinda racist.īut hey, that’s just me wildly guessing. That is, does treating racism like a game of “made you look,” or manipulating it as a means of public entertainment, serve to push back against bigotry or promote it? If anything, flippantly flashing a potentially racist symbol (one that has been earnestly adopted), seems like a way to indulge in the benefits of a presumed exemption from matters of race in an aggressively juvenile (or proudly boyish) way. And put aside that any symbol can be recruited, politicized, distorted beyond recognition, and deployed into live trolling - from Fred Perry polos to cartoon frogs to Fred Perry polos with cartoon frogs.įrom my less than comfortable bed here at the mental institution, my triggered, paranoid, libby, whatever brain still has the wherewithal to wonder: If a gesture is used to disingenuously signal something racist, is that really much better than, say, just signaling something racist? (Call it white noise.) It starts to seem normal.īut put aside for a moment that these hoaxes loosen the common turf of truth, making it tough for anything to take root. It’s like lowering the frequency of a dog whistle slightly it becomes something detectable only as a murmur in the background. In a vacuum, he’d have a point, as would all of those doubters hastily scouring Google to assemble a long pictorial history of people innocuously saying “OK.” But time, the elasticity of language, and several witting and unwitting forces have together conspired to change “OK” - if not a symbol of white supremacy then at least a vessel for it to be smuggled into the discourse, and pass in plain sight while retaining plausible deniability. “If you think is a racist symbol commit yourself to a mental institution immediately,” one tweeter complained amid the fresh uproar over. Both groups have denounced bigotry, yet both seem to attract high numbers of angry young men spouting white nationalist talking points and sporting soon-to-be-dated haircuts, and both love declaring their OK-ness. And earlier this summer, four members of an Alabama police force were suspended without pay for a week after a published photo caught them flashing the sign below the waist. (If it was the circle game, they’ve got a few million charley horses to deliver.)Ī quick click around Twitter turns up multiple instances of the sign among members of right-wing groups operating at various degrees of alt-: from the “Western chauvinist” tight bros in tighter polos the Proud Boys to the ostensibly more love-driven “free speech” outfit the Patriot Prayers. Prior to that, legal operative Zina Bash was criticized for displaying it multiple times in the background at Brett Kavanaugh’s confirmation hearing. Last week, a member of an emergency response team in Charleston, S.C., was removed from duty after not-so-furtively flashing the sign over the shoulder of his team captain during a live interview. Coming from those now-public figures who’ve proven most fond of throwing it (and teaming it with a knowing smirk), it’s impossible to tell if the sign is sincerely sinister shorthand for white supremacy or merely a kind of douchey magic spell that triggers libs with a wiggle of the fingers.Īnd increasingly, it seems like an irony lost on itself. Which, of course - a thousand duhs - is by design. Since then, the gesture has curled the claws of high-profile nationalist provocaturds like Milo Yiannopolous and Richard Spencer, and has effectively spread across alt-right and alt-lite photo ops relatively unchecked for the last two years.īut all of this apparent quacking from likely ducks doesn’t (and can’t) say anything definitive about the intent behind the silent gesture. We must force to dig more, until the rest of society ain’t going anywhere near that. “Leftists have dug so deep down into their lunacy. claiming that the OK hand sign is a symbol of white supremacy,” reads the post-zero of the phenomenon. “e must flood Twitter and other social media websites.

Meat gazer meme