Ok, because this is getting absolutely ridiculous, I think I'm going to have to address this.
We can all agree that in Saudi Arabia women are an oppressed and subjugated group. The degree to which they are subjugated and oppressed can be argued all day, but it is fair to say at minimum, they do not enjoy the same rights and freedoms as their male counterparts. Now imagine if a group of Saudi activists started a campaign labelled "All Saudi Women Lives Matter", and then you have another group of mostly Saudi men respond with, "no All Saudi Lives Matter." What exactly is the purpose behind these mostly Saudi men in saying something like that? They live in a country/society/region that has catered to their demographic for thousands of years. What else besides ignorance or a drive to drown out the voices of these activists would compel these Saudi men to make such proclamations?
Imagine if when the World Wildlife Foundation makes a statement calling people to action in saving the lives of endangered animals, someone retorted with, "yeah but all animal lives matter!" Would we not think that person to be a high functioning idiot for making a statement so lacking in reason and intellect? We would all be shaking our heads and laughing.
Female infanticide is a major problem in many parts of the world. If someone were to start a movement calling attention to why the lives of baby girls are important, but they are then shouted down by people disingenuously arguing that "no, all baby lives matter," how incredibly irritating would that be? For starters, I can't for the life of me recall hearing a news story or report where a baby was aborted because its parents received the "unfortunate" news that they were going to have a baby boy. There is only one reason to retort in such manner. It is to spread disinformation and try to steer the course of dialogue in an area that simply maintains the status quo.
My father comes from a country where the majority of the population are Muslim. But in this country, people of non Muslim origin are oppressed and live at the mercy of a population that can make their lives miserable at the drop of a hat. If person from that community were to stand up and say that their lives mattered, and I yell out proudly, "all the lives of the people in this country matter", do you not realise how utterly despicable it would be for me to do that? The government of my father's home country was founded by people like me. The majority of people living there are like me. The institutions and systems in that country were designed from the get go to work in the favour of people like me. To then turn around and make it seem like the non Muslim person and I enjoy the same status and are treated the same by society and our government, is naive at best, and being a calculating asshole at worst.
It's not rocket science people. It doesn't take much brain power to realise that stating that one particular thing is important doesn't negate that other things are also important. But when the other things aren't in an equally perilous situation, it begs the question what is the need for you to make the point you're trying to make?
The lives of White Americans as a group has ALWAYS mattered in the United States of America. But the same has never been true for minorities. You can pinpoint the exact moments in history when the lives of minority groups mattered little if at all in America. You can say, "in that place, on that date, at that time, the lives of Native/African/Latino/Asian Americans did not matter." Whether it is slavery, the Trail of Tears, Jim Crow, the burning of Black Wall Street, the Tuskegee syphilis experiment, Japanese American internment, the experience of being a Muslim and/or Brown American in the 00s, etc. There is no point in American history where White Americans have ever been treated in such manner. So when the overwhelming majority of people saying, "ALL LIVES MATTER" just so happen to be White Americans, you're left wondering what game is being played here?
Maybe it's because I'm not American that this stuff makes me scratch my head. Or perhaps I should stop being so interested in sociology and history. Because the more you know of that, the more certain people's comments and opinions become dumber and asinine :/
*End Rant.
