As violence against Asians escalates, Black Lives Matter matters even more.‍

While searching for a translation of Black Lives Matter into Chinese, to activate a graphic design of solidarity, I was struck that none were adequate to the task. An existing version in popular usage was fraught with the capacity to be twisted into a demeaning interpretation. It took linguistic scholarship, adjusting and inserting “Black Lives” into a well-known, Chinese idiomatic expression of “It’s a matter of Life or Death,” to arrive at this manipulation-resistant version. Adding Better together. for this banner is putting the better translation in concert with a call for unification against the polarizing effects of white supremacy.

‍