White Lives Matter has been added to a list of hate groups by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), which tracks extremist groups in the U.S.
The SPLC announced that ‘White Lives Matter’ will be added to its annual “Hate Map” in February, which currently lists 892 other hate groups in the United States.
“White Lives Matter is a white supremacist group founded by people with long histories in racist movements,” the SPLC said on its website. “The group, which is dedicated to ‘the promotion of the white race,’ claims to have representatives in several states, which the SPLC is currently investigating.”
READ MORE: Armed ‘White Lives Matter’ group protests outside Houston NAACP
The white nationalist group says on its website the U.S. is facing a “white genocide” because of immigrants and a “race-mixing agenda.”
Mark Potok, a senior fellow at SPLC, told Global News it was an “extremely easy decision” to designate White Lives Matter as a hate group.
“The people who run the White Lives Matter campaign are neo-Nazis,” Potok said. “This is not simply another version of Black Lives Matter. This is a neo-Nazi enterprise, which is all about White Supremacy.”
Members of ‘White Lives Matter’ recently made headlines after holding a protest outside the Houston office of National Association for the Advancement of Colored People to denounce the Black Lives Matter.
READ MORE: Here’s why ‘All Lives Matter’ is so controversial
Reports from The Houston Chronicle and images posted to social media showed some of the protesters were armed with assault rifles and carried Confederate flags.
Potok said he hopes defining the organization as a hate group will further “marginalize” it
“We don’t want people to think that White Lives Matter is some kind of a white version of Black Lives Matter,” he said. “Black Lives Matter is real civil rights movement. White Lives Matter is a poisonous, racist attack on non-white people.”
Meanwhile, the organizations has not added Black Lives Matter to the list of hate groups because its founders and activist member of the group have done “nothing at all to suggest that the bulk of the demonstrators hold supremacist or black separatist views.”
“Black Lives Matter is not a hate group,” SPLC president Richard Cohen wrote in a July blog post. “But the perception that it is racist illustrates the problem. Our society as a whole still does not accept that racial injustice remains pervasive.”
Potok identified Rebecca Barnette, of Tennessee, as one of the “key leaders” of White Lives Matter. The SPLC says Barnette has leadership roles in both the skinhead group Aryan Strikeforce and the neo-Nazi group National Socialist Movement.
Barnette, who describes herself as working to “create a new world” for white people, appears to run both the White Lives Matter website and Facebook page, the SPLC says.