On the evening of Friday, Dec. 13, Kathy Zoner, Chief of Police for the Cornell University Police Department (CUPD), sent out an all-campus email in which she apologized for using the phrase “All Lives Matter” in an earlier message.
Zoner, who frequently sends out emails to students, faculty, and administrators about various campus safety issues, sent an email on Dec. 8 with the subject line “PLEASE READ: All Lives Matter” and the following message:
Note how in her original message Zoner capitalizes each word of the now-controversial phrase “all lives matter.” Because one would not regularly capitalize every word in a sentence, it can be inferred that Zoner must have seen the phrase written like so elsewhere on the Internet. But in her apology email she changes the phrase to “#AllLivesMatter,” calling the Twitter hashtag a “disrespectful pushback against #BlackLivesMatter.” At the end of the day, whether you use a hashtag or not, or whether you use correct grammar or not, the phrase is the same phrase.
So what happened between the time Zoner first saw the phrase used on the Internet and took a liking to it and Friday evening, when she issued an apology to more than ten thousand people on campus for using it?
In a strikingly similar occurrence, Smith College’s president was forced by students to issue an apology for using phrase “All Lives Matter” instead of “Black Lives Matter.” Smith College students took to Twitter, and probably to email too, to force the apology and retraction. Did something similar happen at Cornell?
The real shocking aspect here is that the chief of police on a college campus has just apologized for using the phrase “all lives matter.” Let that sink in.
Zoner has not replied to an email inquiry concerning her statement to the campus.