The city of Portland, Oregon, was shaken to its core over the weekend, as it appeared that a city courthouse was displaying a “white power symbol” in its windows. Everyone waited with bated breath for the outcome of an investigation.
The result: It was a basketball poster of Portland Trailblazers star Damian Lillard, with the hand symbol for a 3-point shot in basketball.
Outside of basketball, the gesture is recognized as the “OK” symbol. It became the target of a 4chan hoax campaign to “falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol,” according to the Anti-Defamation League, which says that the “overwhelming usage” of the symbol is for non-nefarious purposes.
The ADL still inexplicably added it to its “Hate on Display” database anyway, but you have to choose to be the idiot who is offended by it.
The “OK” symbol is also used in what is called the “circle game,” where a person makes the symbol and tricks someone into looking at it so they can be punched.
The media has hyperventilated over the circle game time and time again, to point of smearing Washington, D.C., firefighters and West Point cadets as white supremacists, when in fact few people outside the narrow Twitter fever-swamps in which journalists live are probably even aware of the gesture’s supposed “white power” meaning . A Chicago Cubs fan who displayed it as a gag for the camera was banned from Wrigley Field for life, and baseball analyst Doug Glanville wrote a pathetic New York Times op-ed on how he had been the victim of a racist taunt.
The symbol has been and still is used by figures ranging from former President Barack Obama to Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren to Pope Francis. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez recently flashed a double “OK” symbol, because she’s actually twice as much of a white supremacist as everyone else.
No, the “OK” hand sign is not a white power symbol. Neither is the circle game, nor are NBA 3-pointers. And neither is drinking milk, nor using a fidget spinner, for that matter.
That so many people, including in the media, are willing to let white supremacists and 4chan trolls dictate to them what is or isn’t racist is, frankly, embarrassing. Here’s hoping that drinking water doesn’t become the next “white power” symbol being used in the deep, racist corners of the internet, or we will all die of dehydration — although we will at least be very woke when we do it.
