๐ณ๐ฑ
I think 4chan is a shit hole and do not in any way approve of them mocking BLM or the movement.
The reason I share this however is to point out the generally harmful group think of people being activists right now, to the extent it is hurting the movement.
4chan consistently has success in these matters. Right now its Bald for BLM which seems to be catching on, and not that long ago they managed to trick everyone into thinking the OK hand gesture was a white supremacist hand gesture and even managed to get it on a list of hate speech.
When 4chan is this successful at manipulating people simply by making something look popular, when that is the only criteria for success, its time to reevaluate the underlying mentality driving our activism.
@freemo Side note, but the whole "๐" debacle is often represented in a way that doesn't quite reflect the reality accurately. The people who started the claim that it's a white supremacist thing were in part also white supremacists. I don't know what the exact proportions of just-for-the-lolz trolls to alt-righters were obviously, but there was enough of the latter, that I think this story can be described relatively accurately as "white supremacists adopting new symbol" rather than "trolls convincing journalists that white supremacists adopted a new symbol". I mean the trolls definitely thought they were doing that, so the truth is somewhere in between. And confusingly the white supremacists also thought they were trolling, as evidenced by the NZ mosque shooter -- he seemes to flash this symbol in some photos "ironically". But if you adopt a symbol "ironically" or "for-the-lulz" you still adopted the symbol...
@freemo I actually didn't see that happen -- I know it was widely reported to be a white supremacist symbol, but I don't remember any innocent person being accused of being racist due to using it. And this makes some sense -- the contexts in which people are using this hand gesture normally are rarely ones in which you could confuse the message for "white power".
@kino
@freemo Huh, the last claim really surprizes me, Care to tell the story? I'd be quite interested.
If no innocents were accused of using it in a racist manner (which doesn't seem to be the case from what you are saying, but I still think it's an interesting argument in abstracto), then I'd say labeling it as a racist symbol was not entirely incorrect -- after all it was mostly racists talking about it, and no one should confuse people using it to just mean "OK" with racists. Contexts with hand gestures are not as clear as with spoken language, but they should be clear enough.
@kino
It was over a year ago ont he fediverse.
I posted something to the effect of "hey guys not ever use of the OK hand gesture is racist, in fact most of the time it just means OK"... probably 20 or 30 people called me racist for that comment and people pushed to have me suspended and blocked.
If someone has a legitimate racist making a clear OK symbol and it seems clear it is racist in nature, I'll be the first to say "fuck you".. but the point here is it is very rare.
It leads to more false accusations than real ones simply because its use as a real hate symbol verges on non existant, and the use of it as a legitimate hand symbol is overwhelmingly common in every day use.
In fact thats exactly what 4chan was going for and why they exploited the situation the way they did.
You'd be right, but I've seen *many* instances were people have disingenuously called people out for "white supremacy" or "racism" simply because they made the ๐ signโknowing full well that it wasn't used in any racist or ethnonationalist context, simply exploiting its journo-powered connotations among members of the dogmatic leftist sphere to smear someone they dislike. Now, tbf, that rarely ever goes anywhere and most people making these claims are ignored or lampooned, but it's still being weaponized against folks.
@timorl
as I said wikipedia tried to compile a fairly exhaustive list of times the OK hand gesture was legitimately used in a racist context and it barely reached the dozen mark.
So if its getting on national lists of hate speech with virtually 0 representation as being used in the way described, that alone shows it is misattributed if nothing else.
I mean hell even ive been accused as a racist for using the Ok symbol before.
@kino