I mean, we know the date that it was proffered as a white power symbol. The guy go said it was was being funny. It was picked up from there.
If before the date, then it was before white supremacists could have picked it up. After that, it depends on how much you want to let fear of being accused of being a white supremacist for using or not condemning the gesture drives your thinking and behavior.
I studied Russian. At one point, I was around a lot of Russians. I'm American. And at one point this strange two-handed gesture of making a fist (more or less) with the left hand and then hitting the thumb-side of the fist with the palm of the right hand was common. I had a friend who made the gesture and somehow picked it up. It was, besides being cool among a certain set of young adult males, meaningless, just something to do with your hands, and often preceded by some sort of finger clicking.
Then I used the gesture around Russians and found that some of them would just turn away if they saw me in the hall or near the department. Finally, somebody thinking, "Ah, a clueless American who's fairly fluent in Russian" pulled me aside and told me to stop doing that gesture. I found out that it was, at least at the time, the gesture you would make across the room to a girl you wanted to bed that night, essentially, "Hey, sweetness, let's f**k and maybe I'll ask you your name eventually." Rude, like the corresponding American gesture of basically the OK sign that you put the index fingure of the other hand through. (In both cases, you leer and make eye contact, otherwise it's just weird as a pick-up gesture.)
In other words, it's like "CCCP". Does it stand for "Cisco Console Command Parser," "Child Care Certificate Program", or "USSR" (in Cyrillic, for Soyuz sovetskikh sotsialisticheskikh republik), "Confluence Composite de Concepteurs et Prestataires" (an obscure French videogame club)? Or any of the four, depending entirely on context?
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