A College President Had to Apologize for Saying ‘All Lives Matter’

Smith College President
Kathleen McCartney thought she was showing solidarity with students
protesting racism and police brutality when she sent a campus-wide
email with the subject line, “All Lives Matter.” But the
anti-racism slogan popular with students is actually the more
selective “black lives matter.”

Uh oh. Burn the heretic!

Students were furious and offended,
according to Fox News:

The Daily
Hampshire Gazette, which first covered the story, quoted one
Smith sophomore, Cecelia Lim, as saying, “it felt like she was
invalidating the experience of black lives.”

In response to student backlash, McCartney apologized in another
campus-wide email Friday, saying she had made a mistake “despite my
best intentions.” 

She wrote that the problem with the phrase lay in how others had
used it.

“I regret that I was unaware the phrase/hashtag “all lives
matter” has been used by some to draw attention away from the focus
on institutional violence against Black people,” she wrote.

In her apology e-mail, McCartney also shared some of the student
emails she received.

She quoted one student as saying: “It minimizes the
anti-blackness of this the current situation; yes, all lives
matter, but not all lives are being targeted for police
brutality. The black students at this school deserve to have
their specific struggles and pain recognized, not dissolved into
the larger student body.”

I understand that police brutality is a problem more commonly
faced by black people, and in light of recent events, it’s
absolutely right to focus on reducing racism in law enforcement
(though there are
certainly other factors at play). Still, asserting that “all
lives matter” doesn’t really conflict with this, especially when
the person expressing that statement was attempting to show support
for anti-racist activism. Context matters, too.

According to Greg Lukianoff, president of the Foundation for
Individual Rights in Education and author of
Freedom from Speech, the muzzling of McCartney is just one
more example of the stifling grip of political correctness at
college campuses. “It’s hard to challenge minds while walking on
eggshells,” he told Fox News.

Unfortunately, as I
noted in a recent op-ed for for The Press Enterprise,
“more and more teens are learning all the wrong lessons about
speech – and believe they have the right not to encounter ideas
that might upset their delicate feelings.”