The SPLC, a nonprofit civil rights organization that classifies and tracks hate groups, will add White Lives Matter to its “hate map”: a nationwide catalog of groups that includes, but is not limited to, neo-Nazis, the Ku Klux Klan, anti-immigrant groups, anti-Muslim groups, and Holocaust deniers.
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The Black Lives Matter movement is not considered a hate group by the SPLC.
According to the SPLC one of the leaders of White Lives Matter is Rebecca Barnette, a woman from Tennessee who also happens to be the vice president of the women’s division of the racist skinhead group Aryan Strikeforce.
The SPLC contends that White Lives Matter is frequently used by white supremacists as a counter-slogan to “Black Lives Matter”, and the movement has been organized into a separate white nationalist group.
Director of the centre’s intelligence report, Heidi Beirich said, “I can’t speak to how many chapters will be listed, but it’s clear that the leadership of the group, the ends of the group – it’s just a flat-out white supremacist group”.
“We are listing them because they are clearly white supremacists”, Beirich told VICE News.
Some demonstrators were holding signs that said “White Lives Matter” and “14 Words” – the latter a reference to a white supremacist motto: ‘We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children’.
The Black Lives Matter movement began to address the incessant and indiscriminate killings of African American young men all over America and became popular this year with the police shootings of several unarmed men of color. “We reject the notion that it is morally wrong for people of European descent to love and support their own race”, the group said in a statement sent to NBC News.
There are some who have said that Black Lives Matter should also be on the hate map but the SPLC disagrees.
The statement also said that the group wants immigrants coming to the United States to “meet a minimum IQ requirement of 100, and should not be allowed to come to Western countries and get paid to not work”. She identified herself as a WLM co-founder on VK.com, a social media site.
The watchdog group says leaders and founders of BLM have no advocated separatist or supremacist views and that the crux of the group’s position is not anti-white, but rather that “black lives also matter”.
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“White Lives Matter” members are expected at an event to be organized by the Aryan Nationalist Alliance, an umbrella group of small white supremacist groups, on September 10-11 in Quinlan Texas, according to the SPLC.
