China Declares ‘All Lives Matter,’ Forgetting the Woke Consider It a Racist Slogan

A message reading "All Lives Matter" is written on the pavement as police in riot gear cas
AP Photo/David Goldman
John Hayward

In its frantic efforts to score political points off the riots hammering American cities, the Chinese Foreign Ministry on Monday declared, “all lives matter” — apparently unaware that the “woke” Left considers this a racist phrase invented by white supremacists to subvert the ideological purity of Black Lives Matter.

“All Lives Matter” has long been seen by the woke Left as a sarcastic rejoinder to “Black Lives Matter” (BLM), an attempt to undermine the BLM movement by nullifying the concerns of activists about black Americans allegedly suffering disproportionately at the hands of police. At best, the movement regards people who say, “all lives matter” as clueless lightweights who offer generic platitudes instead of taking the concerns of the BLM movement seriously.

“To those who find [All Lives Matter] offensive or misguided, especially those sympathetic to the Black Lives Matter movement, the statement — particularly in a social media hashtag — is not seen as a Kumbaya sentiment but as a way to remove focus from the specific grievances of black Americans,” the New York Times explained in 2016.

USA Today quoted academics who denounced “all lives matter” and a hashtag of the same name on Twitter as pure racism. In their most charitable mood, these “experts” said people who use the phrase were trying to conceal their discomfort with honestly discussing white racism. Time agreed, denouncing the phrase as “nifty but nasty moral jujitsu.”

Vox published a set of insulting and aggressive “explanations” for why everyone should “stop saying all lives matter” in 2016, including these pearls of wisdom from Twitter:

The police department in Frankton, Indiana, tried writing, “all lives matter” on the side of its police cars as a slogan of general goodwill but was pressured by angry activists into removing the stickers in September 2019. Local officials said they did not realize the phrase was considered insulting to the BLM movement.

Even high-ranking Democrat politicians have been excoriated by the woke Left for saying, “all lives matter.” 2016 Democrat presidential candidate Martin O’Malley, former governor of Maryland, was pressured into apologizing for saying it when he became embroiled in an argument with activist hecklers. The winner of the 2016 Democrat primary, Hillary Clinton, was criticized by angry activists for saying it, as was Bernie Sanders, who ran in both 2016 and 2020. 

2020 presidential candidate Pete Buttigieg was treated like the target of a thoughtcrime investigation because he said, “all lives matter” in 2015. Buttigieg claimed he did not understand why the phrase was bad but had learned his lesson and would never say it again.

Chinese Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Hua Chunying made her “all lives matter” comment while retweeting a comment from Moussa Faki Mahamat, chair of the African Union Commission. Mahamat wrote to condemn “the murder of George Floyd that occurred in the United States of America at the hands of law enforcement officers.”

Mahamat referenced past African Union resolutions against “racial discrimination in the U.S.A.” to “reaffirm the AU’s rejection of continuing discriminatory practices.”

“I further urge the authorities in the United States of America to intensify their efforts to ensure the total elimination of all forms of discrimination based on race or ethnic origin,” he said in the passage cited directly by the Chinese Foreign Ministry.

The African Union in April criticized Communist China for outright and blatant racial discrimination against black immigrants in the southern city of Guangzhou, where many of them were forced to sleep on the streets because restaurants, hotels, and landlords refused to serve them. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) blamed Africans for bringing the Wuhan coronavirus back into China after it had supposedly been eliminated.

Mahamut, however, used very mild language when reprimanding the Chinese, politely expressing “extreme concern at allegations of maltreatment of Africans in Guangzhou” and praising the African Union’s “excellent relations” with Beijing, which has loaned billions of dollars to African nations as part of its Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

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