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But I mean all lives do matter. I see people get offended by that statement. All Lives Matter includes blacks, hispanics, whites. Everyone.

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    @ouflak I've rolled back your edit. The edit was apparently an attempt to discuss the question. You should use comments to discuss the question and its closure, and not edit the question itself.
    – James K
    May 29, 2021 at 9:41
  • @JamesK, If I were the author, and my question had been closed for this reason. This is exactly how I would respond to that closure. Indeed, it is the only logical response that I can think of. I could have put that in a comment and voted to reopen, but as the original question had not changed in any significant way, I cannot see how it be reopened (left closed for the same reasons that it was closed in the first place.).
    – ouflak
    May 29, 2021 at 9:46
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    @ouflak have you read the answers to the question this was closed as a dupe of? They directly refer to "All Lives Matter" in their answers, rather than just "White Lives Matter". This question can be directly answered by reading at least the top two answers to that question. There is no need to reopen this question, as it is answered in its entirety by the other one. Including the questions raised in your edit.
    – fyrepenguin
    May 29, 2021 at 10:43
  • @fyrepenguin, Yes, which was the reason why decided to edit an update into the original to get it back into the ReOpen queue. Two of the top three answers refer only to American Whites. The second answer actually is based on a mis-applied logical fallacy. The top answer does misdirect 'Whites' to 'All', but that actually misses the point of the original question. The poeple who extort 'White Lives Matter' clearly don't mean 'All'. I perused the rest of the answers and they all well represented the classical American Black/White race divide, as expected.
    – ouflak
    May 29, 2021 at 11:54
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    The answers to the other question shouldn’t matter to the question of duplicate or not. 2 different questions may sometimes have the same answer, or both be answered by quoting the same thing, etc; but that doesn’t make the question itself a duplicate.
    – GendoIkari
    May 30, 2021 at 15:07

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If this was a question of mathematical logic, you could create a nice Venn diagram and "Black Lives" would be included in "All Lives," which would make "All Lives Matter" inclusive of "Black Lives Matter." But the sociological context is a nation whose founding document used the language "All men are created equal" while simultaneously excluding people with darker skin from that conceptualization of "all."

Given that the United States has yet to grapple with both its past history of race-based slavery, and its current reality of pervasive racial discrimination, many people still hear "all" as implicitly exclusionary --and in fact, many people do use it in that way. While there were initially people who embraced the concept of "all lives matter" in a genuine attempt to be more inclusive, this phrasing now used most often by people whose agenda is to stop the progress towards racial equity represented by the "Black Lives Matter" movement. Its use exploits the positive and inclusive literal meaning of the words as a disguised way of affirming a social context that is tilted sharply against members of a particular identified race.

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  • So it's offensive when interpreted with the sociological context meaning mentioned here. It's not the statement by itself literally that is offensive (as in the mathematical Venn diagram logic). Is that correct?
    – user
    Aug 7, 2020 at 3:56
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    @Pat-Laugh, how can logic be offensive? Language is a social construct and that is where offensive language comes in.
    – o.m.
    Aug 7, 2020 at 4:53
  • @o.m. I meant whether or not the statement is offensive if interpreted literally (as opposed to it having a kind of disguised use, depending on a context, as mentioned in the answer), not whether or not the interpretation itself is offensive (if that's what you were referring to)
    – user
    Aug 7, 2020 at 5:05
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    @Pat-Laugh - All natural language is contextual. It's only in mathematics that terms have exact, stable definitions. Given that, it's difficult, if not impossible, and probably unadvised, to try to understand this phrase outside of the situations in which it is actually used. It's not like it's a phrase that was in common usage prior to the current times.
    – Chris Sunami
    Aug 7, 2020 at 13:19
  • I had to vote this up for the mentioning of ""All men are created equal". Plenty of people are deliberately ignoring that "all" means "all" in this sentence; plenty of people would deliberately ignore that "all" means "all" when you say "all lives matter".
    – gnasher729
    May 29, 2021 at 22:13

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