Hey Doug Glanville, Are You Upset By 'The New York Times' Ambiguous Racist Positioning of Your OpEd?

Doug Glanville

UPDATE BELOW

By Robert Wenzel

Recently during a television broadcast of a Chicago Cubs game at Wrigley Field, the former Major League Baseball player, now baseball television in-game analyst, Doug Glanville, was on camera doing commentary for NBC Sports Chicago, behind him a fan wearing a Cubs sweatshirt made an upside-down “O.K.” sign with his hand.

Many took the sign to indicate white supremacy.

Glanville, who is black, explained the ambiguity of the sign in a recent New York Times op-ed essay:

The meaning of this hand gesture can be ambiguous. It has long been used to simply say, “O.K.” Some people also use it to play the “circle game,” where you hold your hand below your waist and try to get others to look at it. And most recently it has been co-opted to express support for white supremacy...

But of course the gesture itself remains ambiguous...It is worth noting that this is precisely why racists embraced the gesture in the first place. According to the Anti-Defamation League, users of the online message board 4chan originally introduced the idea that the “O.K.” sign was a white supremacist symbol as a prank to get the media to overreact to innocuous gestures — but the sign soon morphed into a genuine expression of white supremacy as well.

But then he blew the call and wrote in the op-ed that he could still be offended, even if the fan was not attempting to signal white supremacy. You see facts don't matter anymore, it is all about identity politics, even when identity may not have been part of the offending event.

Which brings me to a question for Glanville:

Hey Doug,

Are you aware that the online edition of your New York Times op-ed is followed by a column titled, "Spring Is the Season to Ask ‘Are You O.K.?’"?

Are you offended?

By Glanville logic in his essay, he should be.

For those of us sticking to reality, it appears that these people, who are so easily offended, have issues with understanding when to let go and how to lead a successful life.

Getting offended by people who don't mean to offend is a crazy way to go through life. One would even think that short shrift should be given to those who do intend to offend.

The haters will get consumed by their own hate, it makes no sense to allow them into your head or to do crazed social justice policing over such events.

UPDATE

The New York Times has changed the online headline:

Robert Wenzel is Editor & Publisher of EconomicPolicyJournal.com and Target Liberty. He also writes EPJ Daily Alert and is author of The Fed Flunks: My Speech at the New York Federal Reserve Bank and most recently Foundations of Private Property Society Theory: Anarchism for the Civilized Person Follow him on twitter:@wenzeleconomics and on LinkedIn. His youtube series is here: Robert Wenzel Talks Economics. More about Wenzel here.