Read the letter Snap’s head of diversity sent to staff about its offensive Juneteenth filter

Illustration by Alex Castro / The Verge

Snap’s vice president of diversity and inclusion apologized this weekend for the distribution of a Juneteeth filter that many people found offensive and offered new details about the how it was created. In an email distributed to the company, Oona King said the filter released Friday was a collaboration between black and white employees — and pushed back against criticism that the company had been culturally insensitive.

The filter — Snap calls them “lenses” — asked users to “smile and break the chains” of slavery. King, who is black, said that “in hindsight, we should have developed a more appropriate lens.”

“Speaking on behalf of my team, clearly we failed to recognize the gravity of the ‘smile’ trigger,” King wrote in a letter to the...

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