UPDATED 23:06 EDT / FEBRUARY 25 2016

NEWS

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg tells staff that all lives don’t matter, only #blacklivesmatter

All lives apparently don’t matter at social networking giant Facebook, Inc., with a memo to staff from Founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg demanding they stop crossing out #blacklivesmatters messages on the company’s message board and replacing it with #alllivesmatter.

According to the memo, obtained by Gizmodo who claim in its headline that it’s racist to believe that all lives matter, Zuckerberg states that supporting #blacklivesmatter is “simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve.”

“We’ve never had rules around what people can write on our walls—we expect everybody to treat each other with respect,” Zuckerberg wrote. “Regardless of content or location, crossing out something means silencing speech, or that one person’s speech is more important than another’s. Facebook should be a service and a community where everyone is treated with respect.”

“This has been a deeply hurtful and tiresome experience for the black community and really the entire Facebook community, and we are now investigating the current incidents.”

All lives do matter

America has a problem, but it’s not one that should be dealt with alone in black and white, but in terms of police brutality and laws that target non-violent (particularly drug using) offenders.

It may surprise many people to know that far more white people are killed each year in the United States than those who are African American; here’s the live stats from the left-wing Guardian and the historical stats show this as well, or as The Washington Times points out “Police kill more whites than blacks, but minority deaths generate more outrage.”

African Americans are killed by police at a higher rate than White Americans, but that doesn’t negate the problem that people, or all colors and creeds, are being killed by police that in many states are out of control, complete with the phenomenon known as “police militarization,” The Washington Times goes on.

Segregating the problem into black and white does nothing to address the real issues here, and in the growing cases of #blacklivesmatter protesters screaming abuse at white students, harassing children at restaurants, threatening riots and more actually works against the many good people of all races who know there’s a broad problem here and something should be done.

Martin Luther King Jr. said famously that “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character,” but at Facebook it would appear that the lives of people of one skin color are now held to be more important than those of everybody else.

Image credit: rosecoloredphoto/Flickr/CC by 2.0

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