> The Guardian columnist Jason Wilson argued that the slogan It's okay to be white was devised by white supremacists in order to stoke overreaction from the left, sow confusion, embed a racist agenda in the mainstream media, and ultimately invite a backlash against anti-racist activism."

Well, looks like they were very successful then.

PSA: If you say it isn't okay to be a race and you attack everyone who says it is okay to be a race, you are not "anti-racist"

When any phrase is used exclusively by alt-right groups as a way to dogwhistle and provoke, it makes sense to label it as something that alt-righters use.

No one is seriously arguing that devoid on the context and who pushes that specific phrasing, that it's "not ok to be white"

You have to intentionally disingenuous to seriously believe that.

When that phrase is used to troll people into freaking out at an innocuous phrase, and they do so, that's on them.

Your sentiment is the root problem of the issue. Any issue that touches on problems facing white people will of course be reflexively supported by the alt right, white supremacist, etc., as well. This makes it impossible to talk about these issues without being associated with those groups or accused of "dog whistling". Similarly, if you speak up about men's issues you are considered part of the manosphere, a misogonyst and probably alt right. Basically any opinion that doesn't sing to the choir is labeled a "dog whistle" and dismissed. Basically we have allowed a small group of anxious people to silence all discussion and it's frankly destructive and untenable in the long run.

I think you've clearly gone off the deep end when you are obsessing about what innocuous phrase has secret meaning to white supremacists. Like the freaking out over the "OK" sign, and the Hispanic guy who got fired because he used it without knowing the super secret meaning.

Seriously, these white supremacists are twisting you into hysterics and make you look like a fool with your obsession with decoding their secret symbols.

No, it's easy and not "off the deep end at all"

The OK symbol is completely ok. There's nothing wrong with it. There's a certain sect of internet cretins who use it to dogwhistle to each other.

When someone uses the OK symbol, it literally means nothing. If that person also belongs to or is adjacent to that certain sect.. then you can start to ask questions but still mainly assume innocent intent.

If that person is using the OK symbol while wearing a MAGA hat, posting pictures with Pepe the frog doing the OK symbol, etc.. You can see clearly the throughline here and it's not illogical or wrong to see what that person is clearly trying to do and call them out on it.

I'm not 'decoding secret symbols', and if a hispanic person truly was fired for just doing an "OK" sign and nothing else, then no one who is serious on the left should support that as that is beyond absurd. For some reason, my bet is that there was a bit more going on than that though, but I could be wrong!

You can look up the story, it was in the fevered summer of 2020 when lots of people were trying to get other people fired for innocent boring stuff in the name of Justice.

Yeah, that's extremely stupid. It seems like he was suing his employer for this, hopefully it went well: https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/06/stop-firin...

After the points I made, do you still think I'm being illogical and off the deep end? I really think what I'm saying about recognizing dogwhistles is important and common sense, but maybe I'm wrong.

Our current hyper-partisan always-on tribalism is a fertile ground for witch hunts and rumors that go off the rails.

The Hispanic OK sign dude is one particularly egregious example of this. I think in most of these cases, the company thinks it's easier to fire the person than bother to investigate what actually happened.

So it's very important to verify that a so called "dog whistle" isn't a hoax or overblown, and sometimes even if some Internet trolls are trying to launch a dog whistle bringing attention to what they're doing is helpful marketing for their cause with all the attention it brings.

I'm orthogonal to your points. I'm not as attached to the symbolic online battle, and I appreciate good trolling.

> It's more important exactly who is using the phrase and why, than what the phrase is.

This is thought-terminating tribal idiocy.

Let's put it in tribal terms for you. If your tribe self-owns by jumping into an obvious bear trap, that's an L for you and yours. Take some responsibility, and maybe slow down to consider the words next time.

Since I don't normally follow "white supremacists", and I would have a hard time finding them even if I wanted, how am I supposed to know what's a dogwhistle and what is not?

It's totally okay to use the OK symbol and pepe the frog, etc. I should have made that more clear; there's no problem in any way whatsoever with them until you start to see a pattern of the person using them being alt-right or adjacent, flirting with it, etc

You ignored their points entirely so I'm not sure why anyone should have to read that BS wall of text.

What were their points, and how do my points not address them? I very much responded, and I should be more clear than until a person is clearly alt-right, them using the OK symbol or pepe the frog is 100% fine and I wouldn't even think about it.

If you are provoked by something as innocuous as "It's OK to be white" you really need to re-examine your commitment to tribalism and dedication to going out of your way to find things to be offended by on the Internet. (Or attached to telephone poles.)

Which was clearly the goal of this experiment, to show how quickly and vehemently people over react to anything that seems to deviate slightly from their personal ideology, no matter how slight.

I think you're dodging my main message. Of course it's ok to be white, I said that very very clearly in my comment I think, right?

The thing is, you have to see who is using and spreading that message. When it's alt-right people, you can assume malicious intent when they use it.

If someone who is not clearly alt-right says it, I wouldn't even think twice as that's literally meaningless, but you have to acknowledge how they are trying to use it as a dogwhistle

There is only one reason someone from one of those subreddits would say that line, and it's to get HN arguing about whether or not it should be taken literally, or as in indication that someone from one of those subreddits is in the room.

It's not?

I was around on the internet when this was happening, so I can tell you the real story. Some people went around posting those signs, printed at home on A4 paper, around college campuses during a time when social justice issues were at a fever pitch in popular culture. Some very sensitive-to-social-justice-issues and sensitive-to-potential-indicators-of-people-being-insensitive-to-social-issues people saw them and became upset on Twitter. I think the signs usually got taken down, but that's what usually happens to signs.

Some people took this as a sign that an evil fifth column was going around trying to win an invisible cultural battle by putting up signs that had no racist content but that implied that someone around town would be willing to put up a racist sign if they had had the chance and the chutzpah.

Other people took this as a sign that the evil first through fourth columns were in such active pursuit of dissenters that they would get mad on Twitter and take down meticulously inkjetted pieces of A4 paper if they so much as implied that dissent was an option.

Few reasonable people took this as a sign that it was, literally, not "OK" to be a white person (what does that even mean? if it's not okay how are they supposed to stop?), but because taking down a sign can be taken to mean that the janitor disagrees with what those cultural mercenaries at Kinko's printed on it, that take got passed around a lot.

I believe the popularity of the sign lies in its ambiguity. You see, the mainstream discourse never went as far as to say "it is not OK to be white." It was hinted at, in a more or less subtle way, through the "white privilege" (some corporations actually have obligatory trainings on this) and in thousands of indirect ways making white people guilty of the skin they were born in.

So for some people the message of that poster was infuriating. You can't openly disagree with the literal meaning, but on the other hand, many people do it internally. They believe that white people as the descendants of slave owners should inherit the collective guilt of their great forefathers (even if it was a family of a third wave of immigrants from Europe that never owned any slaves). The very fact we are even discussing that is telling in itself.

Case in point.

It is okay to be who you are. It doesn't matter your race or nationality, your sex or gender or creed. It's okay to be white. It's okay to be black. It's okay to be Asian. It's okay to be First Nations, Native, Indigenous. It's okay to be male or female or intersexed or trans. It's okay to be Catholic or Protestant or Sunni or Shia or Jewish or Orthodox or Baha'i or Zoroastrian or Buddhist or Hindu or Taoist or Shinto or any other creed.

For all people everywhere, it is emphatically okay to exist.

If you disagree with that, then I think you need to re-examine who is engaging in supremacist politics.

It definitely is ok to be white. It’s not ok to be a white supremacist, though.

Not everything has to be black and white and divisive.

"White" is meaningless, isn't it? At best it's a judgement about skin pigmentation.