Are valknut tattoos racist1/16/2024 “I always consider three things: If you see someone spray paint KKK, it’s not the Klan. “People know it will attract attention,” he says. The visibility of hate symbols also makes them prime fodder for trolls and other ne’er-do-wells who know such symbols are shorthands for fear, pain and outrage – like teenagers tagging the sides of buildings or a recent incident in which a group online tried to convince the Internet a simple bird meme was actually a hate symbol by photo-shopping a swastika on it. “He was certainly familiar with the concept of 88,” Pitcavage says. In 2015, Dylann Roof took 88 bullets with him into the Charleston, South Carolina, church where he killed nine people in 2015.Last year, a large neo-Nazi group called the National Socialist Movement announced it would be shedding depictions of the swastika in what their leader told The New York Times was “an attempt to become more integrated and more mainstream.”Īs a replacement, the NSM chose the Othala Rune, an pre-Roman symbol co-opted by Nazi Germany. “The Nazis have such brand name power that they are going to be dominating white supremacist symbology for a century to come,” he says.īut there is risk in this hyper-visibility. He wants you to know, right off the bat, that nothing will ever top the swastika when it comes to hate. He studies extreme right-wing groups and maintains the ADL’s hate symbols database. Mark Pitcavage is a senior research fellow at the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. Like other symbols in this article, a lot of what determines whether the “OK” sign is a hate symbol is the context in which it is used. When Australian white supremacist Brenton Tarrant was pictured flashing the symbol in a court appearance after killing 51 people at two New Zealand mosques, any irony in the gesture was effectively erased. The joke caught on among trolls, and there have been several instances of people being disciplined after showing the sign on camera or in public. Why the “OK? sign? The general idea is that the looped and extended fingers resemble the letters W and P, standing for “white power.” According to the ADL, the symbol was first created as a hoax or meme among alt-right groups, who wanted other people and the media to get upset about it and thus look foolish condemning an innocuous symbol.
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