Pete Buttigieg Says He Didn’t Understand Context Around Phrase ‘All Lives Matter’ in 2015

BUTTIGIEG: "At that time I was talking about a lot of issues around racial reconciliation in our community. What I did not understand at that time was that that phrase just early into mid — especially 2015 was coming to be viewed as a sort of counter-slogan to Black Lives Matter. So this statement seems very anodyne and something that nobody can be against. It actually wound up being used to devalue what the Black Lives Matter is telling us, which is what we needed to hear because unfortunately it was not obviously to everybody that black lives were being valued the same. So that is the contribution of Black Lives Matter and it's the reason why since learning about how that phrase was being used to push back on that activism I've stopped using it in that context."