But the student protested that he was merely indicating “3,” the number of his football jersey, which he was also wearing in the photo. These form a “V” and an “L” – a symbol of the Vice Lords gang. He was accused of flashing a gang sign because his thumb and two other fingers were outstretched. To avoid any association with the gangs, school officials advised students to avoid wearing the clothing.Īnd in March 2014, a Mississippi high school placed a student on indefinite suspension after he had been photographed standing next to his biology project. However, the number is also a symbol of the northern California Norteños gangs, as “N” is the 14th letter of the alphabet. In 2013, a group of California high school seniors ordered sweatshirts with “XIV” – their year of graduation – emblazoned on them. The campaign was changed when state officials discovered that the street and prison gang the Gangster Disciples also used the symbol. In 2007, the Virginia Tourism Agency created an ad campaign that included actors making the heart sign: curled fingers joined with thumbs pointing downward. Emily Molli/NurPhoto via Getty Images Gang signs and moral panicĪ very similar dynamic involving gang signs has played out over the past couple of decades. There have also been cases of mistaken identity, however.ĭuring the 2019 Army-Navy football game, midshipmen and cadets flashed what seemed to be the white power gesture on-camera behind the ESPN commentator – a game that was politically charged because then-President Donald Trump was in attendance.ĭemonstrators carry Confederate and Nazi flags during the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., on Aug. The Anti-Defamation League went on to add the gesture to its database of hate symbols. Shortly thereafter, school officials recalled yearbooks in Petaluma, California, and Chicago after discovering pictures of students making the gesture. In May 2019, an attendee at a Chicago Cubs baseball game made the gesture on camera behind a Black reporter, prompting the team to ban him from Wrigley Field. But what began as an effort to “ troll the libs” quickly took on a life of its own. “ Operation O-KKK” encouraged the flooding of social media sites like Twitter with posts proclaiming the familiar gesture to be a symbol of the alt-right. ![]() ![]() ![]() But it took off in February 2017, when a prank message was posted on 4-chan, the anonymous messaging site that has been a breeding ground for racism and conspiracy theories. In 2015, Milo Yiannopoulos, Richard Spencer and other figures of the “ alt-right,” a white nationalist movement, started using the hand gesture in posed photos of themselves. How did something as benign and commonplace as the “OK” hand gesture come to assume such sinister undertones? And what does the University of Nebraska’s willingness to change its mascot say about the ways in which ambiguous signs and symbols can take on a life of their own? A new way to hate? The University of Nebraska determined that the ‘OK’ gesture was too prone to misinterpretation, prompting a change to one of its logos.
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