It's Not Okay To Be Okay

D. C. United (because American soccer teams need to have names that make them sound like they're European soccer teams) have fired their head athletic trainer. The offense? Making a "discriminatory hand gesture." Despite the fact that "The 'OK' hand gesture — making a circle with the thumb and index finger while the other three fingers point out — is typically used to indicate that all is well," White supremacists and the sort have apparently started using it; the idea here being twofold. One is that, viewed in a certain way, the "okay" hand sign becomes the letters W and P, for "White power." The other is that, because it's also the okay sign, that when someone calls a person out for using it, that person can claim innocence. After all, it's just the okay sign. This all has led at least some people have started to think that it should be ceded to the far Right and abandoned by the rest of society.

This, as the saying goes, is why we can't have nice things.

To be sure, I'm not particularly worried about a slippery slope here. As with a lot of things, the decision that "okay" is now fit only for White supremacists is a completely arbitrary choice. Maybe the next time, the conclusion will be different.

What I find irritating about this is the fear. A small minority of the population has been able to, in effect, force a change in the visual lexicon of the United States because people are afraid of them, what they represent and the idea that their ideology is attractive enough to spread out of control.

Part of this is politics. National Republicans have put themselves in a position where they can't just kick the farthest of the far Right to the curb, and be done with them. This leads to a creeping anxiety that, at some point, that a combination of political expediency and negative partisanship will lead to the Republicans openly supporting the sort of racist and segregationist politicians that many people today want to think died out in the Deep South in the period immediately after the Civil Rights era.

But part of it is the realization that these sorts of ideologies often appeal to the disaffected, and there are an awful lot of disaffected people out there. And no one seems to be doing anything to make their lots in life better, because that would upset the apple cart that is the current status quo.

Now, I haven't seen the photograph in question. It's entirely possible that the former head athletic trainer for D. C. United is, in fact, a White supremacist. Personally, that doesn't strike me as a firing offense, but I don't work in D. C. United's human resources department, so what I think doesn't matter. Someone whose opinion of these things does actually matter may have seen some context in the picture that buttresses the choice they made.

The National Public Radio story on the whole thing, however, doesn't provide any information that would allow someone to conclude that the sign wasn't something innocuous. Part of the reason behind the fringes of the American Right adopting the sign, the logic goes, is that it's so ubiquitous that everybody does it. Calling it out, therefore, is likely to result in a high rate of false positives, and strike a lot of people (including myself) as hysterical.

Treating the White nationalist (or whatever else one wants to call them, or they're calling themselves) as if they were ten feet tall seems like an error to me. But I understand that fixing the underlying problems that they're taking advantage of is difficult, especially in a country where the idea that different groups are working at cross purposes over a zero-sum pie is taken for granted. But the reactive mode of dealing with them isn't going to work. History should have taught everyone that by now.