A Major League Soccer team has fired its head athletic trainer for making a hand gesture that has been associated with white supremacy and hate groups.
Reade Whitney, who worked for D.C. United, was dismissed on Friday after a team photo showed him displaying the “OK” hand signal, which is traditionally used to express approval or agreement, but has been co-opted by white supremacists and internet trolls in recent years.
“There is no place for racism, homophobia, misogyny, or discrimination of any kind in our sport and world and D.C. United do not tolerate any acts of this nature,” the team said in a statement.
Efforts to reach Whitney for comment were not immediately successful.
The gesture, which involves making a circle with the thumb and index finger while the other three fingers point out, was originally part of a hoax on 4chan, an online message board known for its controversial and extremist content. In 2017, some users launched a campaign to trick the media and left-leaning people into believing that the gesture was a symbol of white power, using the logic that the three straight fingers form a “W” shape, while the closed thumb and forefinger represent the letter “P”.
However, the hoax was so successful that some white supremacists have adopted the gesture as a sincere expression of their ideology, or as a way of trolling their opponents.
“By 2019, at least some white supremacists seem to have abandoned the ironic or satiric intent behind the original trolling campaign and used the symbol as a sincere expression of white supremacy,” the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), a Jewish civil rights organization, said on its website.
The ADL added the gesture to its list of hate symbols in 2019, along with other symbols such as the swastika, the Confederate flag, and the Ku Klux Klan cross.
The gesture has been used by prominent figures such as Richard Spencer, a white nationalist leader; Milo Yiannopoulos, a right-wing provocateur; and Brenton Tarrant, the suspect in the Christchurch mosque shootings in New Zealand, who flashed it in court after killing 51 people.
The gesture has also been involved in controversies involving celebrities, politicians, and sports fans, who have either been accused of using it intentionally or unintentionally.
In May 2019, a Chicago Cubs fan was banned from Wrigley Field for making the gesture behind a black sports reporter during a live broadcast. The fan claimed he was playing a game called “circle game”, where one person tries to trick another into looking at the gesture below waist level.
In July 2023, France’s far-right leader Marine Le Pen faced criticism for making the gesture in a selfie with Ruuben Kaalep, the youth leader of Estonia’s far-right EKRE party. Le Pen said she had no idea of the gesture’s second meaning.
“It’s not just a simple hand gesture. It’s a way of communicating with other people who share your beliefs,” Keegan Hankes, a senior research analyst at the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), a civil rights group that tracks hate groups, told BBC News.
Hankes said that while some people may use the gesture innocently or ironically, others may use it as a “dog whistle” to signal their allegiance to white supremacy or to provoke outrage from their opponents.
He said that people should be aware of the context and intent of the gesture before jumping to conclusions or dismissing it as harmless.
“It’s important to understand how these symbols are being used and what they mean,” he said. “They’re not just jokes. They have real-world implications.”
Relevant articles:
– A Major League Soccer trainer was fired for flashing the ‘OK’ hand sign in a photo, NPR, July 23, 2023
– OK hand sign added to list of hate symbols, BBC News, July 24, 2023
– OK Hand Symbol: 5 Fast Facts You Need to Know, Heavy.com, July 25, 2023
– When is the ‘OK’ gesture not OK?, BBC News, July 26, 2023