A photograph has been circulating this weekend of an elected Arkansas official flashing the universally known “OK” sign, raising anew among those who spotted it a debate about darker alternative meanings for the hand signal.
The politician told me through a spokesman that he’s never known the symbol — making an O with thumb and index finger and the other three fingers upraised — to mean anything but “OK.” The question was “ridiculous,” the spokesman said.
The Arkansas official happened to be photographed, with a smile, making the sign during a meeting with Patriots of Act 746, a group dedicated to the proposition that open carry of guns is legal in Arkansas and no permits are needed to carry either openly or concealed. The group is generally conservative in outlook.
I’ll follow the counsel of the Anti-Defamation League, which offers this useful explainer on the OK hand signal. It says caution should be used in evaluating its use. Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar, in other words.
The familiar interpretation dates to the 17th century, the ADL writes.
In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.
In the case of the “okay” gesture, the hoax was so successful the symbol became a popular trolling tactic on the part of right-leaning individuals, who would often post photos to social media of themselves posing while making the “okay” gesture.
Ironically, some white supremacists themselves soon also participated in such trolling tactics, lending an actual credence to those who labeled the trolling gesture as racist in nature. By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy, such as when Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant flashed the symbol during a March 2019 courtroom appearance soon after his arrest for allegedly murdering 50 people in a shooting spree at mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which cuts no slack to bigots, provides a similar back story. But it also says those taking offense might not simply be silly liberals. The symbol has been adopted by Trump-friendly young people hoping to “trigger the liberals” as well as by militiamen with darker thoughts, SPLC writes.
The Law Center quotes from a video by Natalie Wynn. What better “secret handshake” than something innocuous, she says.
Modern fascists have taken to using almost arbitrary emoji as a way to wink and nod at each other, notably the frog, after Pepe, the milk, and the OK sign.
… Another advantage of using innocuous symbols is that when leftists try to point those symbols out, the fascists can always say, “These gullible SJWs [social justice warriors] now think that even the OK sign is racist. Is there anything they *don’t* think is racist?”
Fair criticism, unless use of the gesture and response were calculated. Still, maybe a politician should be careful about flashing the symbol around, such as for followers of the closed Facebook page of a right-wing gun group.
This Twitter search thread gives you some idea of the different thoughts on who’s trolling whom.