We live in a post-dada world. The way many of us make our points now (both online and off) are with pithy memes, reaction gifs, ironic tee shirts, and pull-quotes from our favorite books/movies/song lyrics.

It should be SOP for fact checkers at news outlets to research the iconography on signs, tattoos, tee shirts, etc for the people they interview/show in crowd footage. B/c a lot of the people at the insurrection yesterday were proudly displaying images that were absolutely racist.

I’ve been posting pictures to my FB for the past few days because a lot of people over there aren’t on twitter and it is shocking to me how many times I’ve had to explicitly say “this is offensive because it means this, here’s a source”.

Most white people who are not marginalized have no reason to know what these things mean and so they don’t. They don’t go looking for them. And when a person is being interviewed, if they’re polite or well dressed or whatever, their takeaway is “oh not them, they’re so NICE”

So news media should run with that. Use the banner at the bottom of the screen. “This person is wearing this symbol, it is accepted in this movement to mean this. This is Pepe the frog. It used to mean x but has been taken up by y group and now is accepted as y”

The problem is these people have absolutely been blatant for YEARS. They have. They have no fear of reprisal for showing their triple triangle nazi tat on national tv because their boss doesn’t know what it means.

And to use that example their boss doesn’t have an incentive to look it up so they won’t, they’ll live in happy ignorance signing Ricky Racist’s paycheck and telling everybody how great he is in IT support. We HAVE to change that.

Part of the reason I say the news media should take this on, is because these symbols change FAST. Memes get abandoned, they morph, they turn into something else. Publishing a book with the information would be useless.

Yes, it is a lot to take on, but wouldn’t creating new jobs be a good thing in the long run?