There must have been a hidden asterisk placed next to the #AllLivesMatter hashtag, because it seems like proponents only care about injustice when it's perpetrated against white Christians.
Last week, President Donald J. Trump signed an executive order that bans citizens from seven countries with a Muslim majority population from entrance into the United States for the next 90 days, stranding individuals seeking refuge from Syria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. Furthermore, the order indefinitely forbids refugees fleeing from Syria entrance into America. In addition to that, students, visitor and Green Card holders from the seven affected countries with permanent U.S. residency were stopped at airports and refused re-entry into the United States, despite having the legal paperwork that should have granted them entrance without issue.
Trump's executive action is a disgraceful act stemming from a supposedly democratic nation that was founded on the promise of freedom of religion and expression for its citizenship. Ironically, Trump's deplorable orders were signed into effect the same day our nation commemorated the Holocaust Remembrance Day. Our country denied entry for Jewish refugees leading up to the Holocaust, and Trump's repetition of history on the same day that memorializes the agonizing loss of 6 million Jews and 5 million others shows just how apathetic our country has become toward the sufferings of others. History is repeating itself in a heinous cycle of ethnocentrism and indifference to the grotesque human rights violations happening to refugees in these targeted regions.
The #AllLivesMatter campaign has been problematic since its invention, but the conventional silence it has adapted in the wake of senseless bloodshed and depravity speaks volumes more than its ignorant rhetoric ever could. No, you do not believe that all lives matter. You hide behind this blanket statement to shield yourself from accepting accountability for your apathy, justifying your own racially-charged inaction and discrediting the reality of the refugee crisis. Your "All Lives Matter" trope benefits people who look and act like you, who speak in your native tongue, who praise your same God. Your "All Lives Matter" conviction extends only toward disrupting and violating the rights of those unlike you, those who lead lives that cause you to experience discomfort due to their foreignness.
You don't give a damn about all the lives being impacted by this ban. You see these refugees as brown people who worship an Islamic God, and that scares you. You have confined yourself to a bubble marked by hatred, bigotry, intolerance and fear. You speak of strength and security for all people, yet your spineless rhetoric has resulted in the deaths of thousands and the closing of borders when the world desperately needed the building of bridges.
You have made sacrificial lambs out of innocent lives, and your hands are permanently stained with the bloodshed stemming from premature deaths. You forced these people to die in vain for your own political agenda.
All lives don't matter, apparently; only yours do.
