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Comment by baddox | Hacker News Reader

Note that all symbols are their meaning are made up. To say "this gesture is a symbol of X" is to say "people made up that this gesture is a symbol of X."

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It's a really odd social phenomenon. It's one thing to say "We don't like X and find it in poor taste. Please don't do that"

I don't like it when folks say such things, but I understand it. Instead, what many folks seem to be saying is that based on one thing they can tell what the person is like inside. It's an amazingly-broad generalization and people seem to be enormously confident of themselves when they make it. I can look at your shoe or color of your shirt and conclude that you are a bad person inside.

I don't find that to be especially rational, but what is one to do?

I don't believe that you don't actually understand the difference between "shoe or shirt color" and flashing hand signs for a photo.

Read about the Bloods and Crips in the '80's, '90's. Schools were banning wearing red and blue because those gangs had hijacked those two colors. Anyone not in those gangs would take care to not wear anything containing those colors.

The op is not wrong for supposing it's possible for someone to be targeted due to wearing "shoe or shirt color".

Yes, of course there are exceptional contexts where clothing color can indicate gang/clan/politicl allegiance.

The topic was "amazingly-broad generalization".

We're really just talking about deliberate communication here, and like with all communication, context is important. In general, the color of someone's clothes isn't communicating much, but it might be at a sporting event.

If you're flashing an "OK" sign in clear view, I would understand that to mean things are okay. If you're flashing the sign below the waist so very few people would notice, I would understand that to mean "I'm giving this sign to very few people and only those in that community would understand what I'm saying".

Context matters.

I suppose that’s pretty reasonable, but from what I have seen causing trouble from people, I really don’t believe that your view is shared by the majority of people causing the outlast against these symbols. I think either already, or in the near future, when someone makes an innocuous OK symbol, it will simply be interpreted as a symbol they are an even worse and more blatant racist, how dare they.

Generally, flashing that sign below the waist is a juvenile game where if one's friend sees the sign, one is entitled to punch them in the genitals (or something to that effect). That would be my first assumption before any kind of racism.

I have a pet theory that this resonates with people that enjoy the simplicity of the puritanical thought patterns and approaches being taken by the (far?) left. Unsurprisingly it fits the terse, inflammatory nature of twitter to the T. I cannot relate with it.

I think the political side isn't even important. A lot of the behavioral patterns we see in the social justice left is what we saw with the religious right a few decades ago. I'd say it's more about adopting popular values from people around you without understanding why these values are important. It's very much like religion in this sense.

This is also a difficult distinction to draw these days because white supremacist groups specifically choose coded symbols in order to publicly display their allegiance while maintaining plausible deniability. I think it's tricky to say anyone who makes the "OK" symbol is a racist because there's a long-standing meaning to that symbol that isn't racist, but on some level the same can be said of the numbers "14" or "88" which are more clearly tied to white supremacy. White supremacists count on the fact that, on the surface, no reasonable person can say that using these symbols makes you a racist. Because this is an explicit strategy to grow their numbers while keeping "normies" in the dark, I think it's important to view things like this in that context. Is it possible someone did something innocent and accidentally used a covert symbol of racism? Absolutely. But when you see repetitive uses of those symbols or a person has a long backlog of questionable actions and comments, at some point you have to draw a line.

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