“OK”不再OK：经典手势为何沦为仇恨符号？

食指与拇指比个圈，另外三根指头翘起来，这是全世界都通行的“OK”手势。但近两年，在美国比出这个手势，却可能惹出麻烦，会被视为支持“白人至上主义”的种族歧视分子。这究竟是怎么一回事？当“OK”手势不再OK，会带来什么样的恶劣影响？一起来听今天的课程讲解

本篇课程首发于2019年12月19日

文本难度：
话题难度：
When the O.K. Sign Is No Longer O.K.
By Vanessa Swales
① Touching the thumb and index finger to make a circle, with the remaining three fingers held outstretched, is a gesture that people around the world have made for centuries, mostly in positive contexts.
② But in recent years, it has also been appropriated for a more malign purpose — to signify “white power.” The gesture has become an extremist meme.
③ It started in early 2017 as a hoax. Some users of 4chan, an anonymous and unrestricted online message board, began what they called “Operation O-KKK,” to see if they could trick the wider world — and especially liberals and the mainstream media — into believing that the innocuous gesture was actually a clandestine symbol of white power.
④ The 4chan hoax succeeded all too well, and ceased being a hoax: Neo-Nazis, Ku Klux Klansmen and other white nationalists began using the gesture in public to signal their presence and to spot potential sympathizers and recruits. For them, the letters formed by the hand were not O and K, but W and P, for “white power.”
⑤ That the gesture has migrated beyond ironic trolling culture to become a “sincere expression of white supremacy,” according to the Anti-Defamation League, could be seen in March 2019 when Brenton Tarrant, the white supremacist accused of killing 50 people in back-to-back mass shootings at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, smiled and flashed the sign to reporters at a court hearing on his case.
(c) 2019 The New York Times Company