system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
CMV: Prescribing non-racist things as racist is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

In the past five years, I have noticed a lot of things that weren't previously considered particularly racist labelled as racist. This seems to be a self-fulfilling prophecy. What I mean is that prescribing these things as racist has tended to set off a chain of events that leads to these things **actually** becoming racist.

I don't want to frame this in some Hegelian Dialectic sort of way. So, I just first want to state that this is not to say that there is some clear historicist pattern to these events.  There are just near-identical underlying ideas behind each of these events. 

I want to refer to three separate instances of this, each at different stages: the Confederate Flag, the "OK" symbol, and Australia Day. The "pattern" (for lack of a better term) I've noticed is something like this:

1. Something generally considered innocuous is prescribed as racist by certain people. The degree to which it has a racist history varies greatly from an unambiguously racist history (Confederate Flag), to an ambiguously, grey history (Australia Day), to an unambiguously non-racist history (The "OK" symbol). What is the case, though, is that these things are not considered racist by the general public. 
2. The movement against these things gains traction. Most of the general public thinks the claims of racism are stupid and groundless, but as they're purely symbolic, they don't really care too much to actively oppose the movement. 
3. The people who **do** care enough to actively oppose the movement, though, are the far-right wishing to "own the leftists". These people then rally around the thing and make it a symbol of their movement. 
4. The far-right's reactionary adoption of the thing leads to the thing **actually becoming** a far-right/racist symbol. This turns public opinion against the thing and leads to it being abolished or ostracised. Australia Day has yet to go down this path, but I predict it's only a matter of time. 

So, in other words: prescribing things as racist leads to them being adopted by the far-right in reaction, which in turn leads to them becoming **actually** racist.
gpt
I think you have this in the wrong order. What happens first is people use the symbol to express racism (even if the people using the symbol to express racism aren't the majority of people using the symbol). _Then_ other people notice this, which starts the discourse against the symbol. It's not like people are out calling symbols racist at random.