When I immediately saw this I thought the Cadets were playing the Circle Game where you make people look with the circle hand sign and punch them on the shoulder. To the U.S. media these Cadets are a bunch of racists:
The Army and Navy academies are looking into hand signs flashed by students that can be associated with “white power” and were televised during the Army-Navy football game on Saturday, school officials said.
Cadets at West Point and midshipmen at the Naval Academy in the stands both appeared to display the sign during the broadcast, officials with the two military academies told The Wall Street Journal. The gesture was seen during an ESPN broadcast segment.
School officials are trying to determine what the hand signals were meant to convey, they said.
Associated Press
You can read more at the link, but this is much to do about nothing. The Anti-Defamation League which all the media articles have been referring back to, states that the white power hand sign is actually a hoax:
In 2017, the “okay” hand gesture acquired a new and different significance thanks to a hoax by members of the website 4chan to falsely promote the gesture as a hate symbol, claiming that the gesture represented the letters “wp,” for “white power.” The “okay” gesture hoax was merely the latest in a series of similar 4chan hoaxes using various innocuous symbols; in each case, the hoaxers hoped that the media and liberals would overreact by condemning a common image as white supremacist.
Anti-Defamation League
The Anti-Defamation League article even says up front that people should use caution when evaluating this hand signal because it is a hoax. Of course the media have fallen for it to once again drive a racial issue in search of clicks. The Cadet in the above picture is not even holding up his hand as an OK hand sign but instead holding in low just like people do with the Circle Game.
However, with that said all said, it would be interesting to know if the cadets were told beforehand to not make any hand gestures in front of television cameras? This seems like an easy way to prevent someone from misconstruing some random hand sign and not have a situation like this happen.
