Someone keeps changing “black lives matter” to “all lives matter” on the walls at Facebook’s headquarters, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg is fed up.
Mark Zuckerberg just explained to Facebook employees why “all lives matter” is offensive
Libby Nelson was Vox’s editorial director, politics and policy, leading coverage of how government action and inaction shape American life. Libby has more than a decade of policy journalism experience, including at Inside Higher Ed and Politico. She joined Vox in 2014.
“Despite my clear communications at Q&A last week that this was unacceptable, and messages from several other leaders across the company, this has happened again,” Zuckerberg wrote today on a private company Facebook page, according to Gizmodo, which has a copy of the post.
He called the repeated substitutions of “all lives matter” a “deeply hurtful and tiresome experience for the black community and really the entire Facebook community.”
Just 2 percent of Facebook’s employees — and 1 percent of its tech employees — are black, according to its latest demographic data.
By now, many, many people have explained, with analogies about family dinners and cartoons about burning houses and tweets about saving the rainforest, why “all lives matter” both misses the point and is an offensive dismissal of a real problem.
Zuckerberg is just the latest: “‘Black lives matter’ doesn’t mean other lives don’t,” he wrote. “It’s simply asking that the black community also achieves the justice they deserve.”
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