White Lives Matter, the group that sent armed protesters to an NAACP office, will soon be on the Southern Poverty Law Center’s “Hate Map,” the organization announced on Saturday.
“We are listing them because they are clearly white supremacists,” Heidi Beirich, a spokesperson for the SPLC, told VICE News.
The Hate Map is a frequently cited list of U.S. hate groups, including neo-Nazi organizations and the Ku Klux Klan. White Lives Matter will join their ranks in February, when the list is updated.
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Meanwhile, the SPLC’s president, Richard Cohen, has emphasized that Black Lives Matter will definitely not appear on the list. In July, he published a statement explaining why his organization does not consider BLM a hate group, taking a swipe at Donald Trump in the process:
“There’s no doubt that some protesters who claim the mantle of Black Lives Matter have said offensive things, like the chant ‘pigs in a blanket, fry ‘em like bacon’ that was heard at one rally,” Cohen wrote. “But before we condemn the entire movement for the words of a few, we should ask ourselves whether we would also condemn the entire Republican Party for the racist words of its presumptive nominee – or for the racist rhetoric of many other politicians in the party over the course of years.”
