So far, every major Democratic candidate for president has had to face down some “serious issues” about past actions that are being scrutinized in a “new light.”

We may be too close to the cascading stories of Joe Biden’s handsiness to properly assess whether the New York Times’ repeated use of the word crisis to describe Nuzzlegate is overblown, but I think overblown it may well be. Beto O’Rourke took donations from people who work in the oil business, which can be explained by the fact that as a U.S. representative from El Paso he was representing people from El Paso. Kamala Harris, while a prosecutor, seems to have been almost prosecutorial in her treatment of criminals, whom she often treated like they were criminals of some sort. And then there’s Amy Klobuchar, who allegedly threw fits and office supplies at members of her staff. People—hey, you can’t throw binders at them, you can’t rub noses with them. What’s a Democratic politician to do?

Then there’s Mayor Pete Buttigieg. Recently, a supposed controversy involving Buttigieg bubbled up: It was revealed that in a speech he gave four years ago, he uttered the words “all lives matter.” But he also spoke at length about racism, diversity, and the relevance of those issues on policing.

More importantly, the idea that “all lives matter” were fighting words—an insensitive, trollish rebuke to Black Lives Matter—was not as fully in the air back then. Buttigieg says he didn’t understand the implication then, in his 2015 State of the City address, and I believe him.

I’ll walk through a timeline of the phrase’s usage to explain why.

Back in 2015, Jamelle Bouie wrote for Slate about then candidate Martin O’Malley responding to Black Lives Matter protesters by saying, “Black lives matter, white lives matter, all lives matter.” O’Malley, trying to appeal to a black audience, unwittingly stepped in it. Bouie explained it was as if someone were to respond to an annual breast cancer drive with “Breast cancer matters. Prostate cancer matters. All cancer matters. It sounds like a dismissal, and that’s how it was received.” At the time Bouie’s explanation was necessary because many white people—and evidently white politicians—had yet to realize that “all lives matter” had the qualities of rebuke or dismissal.

O’Malley’s statement wasn’t totally benign, because he did use the phrase in response to the criticism that black lives matter. A month earlier, speaking before the black congregants at Christ the King United Church of Christ in Florissant, Missouri, Hillary Clinton also used the phrase “all lives matter,” summing up lessons she learned from her mother: “I asked her, ‘What kept you going?’ Her answer was very simple. Kindness along the way from someone who believed she mattered. All lives matter.” Upon hearing these words the mostly black audience applauded.

Note that Hillary’s utterance, which did receive blowback online, wasn’t seen as so tone-deaf as to prevent the famously cautious Hillary Clinton from saying it. It was more than three months earlier that Buttigieg said “all lives matter” as he addressed tension facing his police department. And he didn’t say it in response to a question of whether black lives matter, which he’s affirmed many times, including this week at the National Action Network Convention. The phrase was uttered at the end of Buttigieg spending close to 1,000 words speaking on issues of race, diversity, and policing. At one point in the 2015 State of the City address he said this:

There is no escaping the fact that the most grievous injustices experienced by minorities in American history were often served at the hands of police officers. And every police officer today, even the most forward-thinking among them, even police officers who are themselves African American, is forced to deal with the fact that even if they had nothing personally to do with those injustices, the uniform did. And so for all the good reasons that our men and women have to be proud of that uniform and the service and sacrifice it represents, it also remains the case that the uniform has a lot to overcome.

That’s a pretty strong statement that I would think would please anyone with a commitment to criminal justice. And the three-word phrase that also appears in the speech is weak evidence of Pete Buttigieg’s imperfection on this issue. I think we—the media, activists, people who earnestly want a president worthy of the title—in a quest to uproot a current president who deals in statements unmoored from their context, can do better than falling into those exact bad habits ourselves.