There Are No Mitigating Circumstances for Racism and Anti-Semitism

Both racism and anti-Semitism are plagues that humanity faces again and again. Like a curse that she cannot get rid of and that compels her down. To believe that she could not live without these demons. How after so many tragedies, massacres, genocides, can the human being still blame his neighbor, his brother of destiny, for being who he is a black man, a Jew, a person whose only fault is not to look like him?

It is to despair of everything. If human genius is limitless, if it allows the achievement of amazing feats, it also has its dark side which at regular intervals reminds us how fragile its structure is. As if humanity as a whole cannot accept the idea that we are all equal — all different but all equal — a community of people whose similarity of destinies seems obvious. we are born, we die, we live, each to our way, each with our very distinct particularities, each with our strengths and our handicaps but all carrying the same aspirations, the same desires, the same fears.

We are all shipwrecked of the existence which somehow try to go in our respective lives and all we suffer from this feeling of abandonment which leads us to seek in religion, drugs, alcohol, art, love, sexuality, consoling virtues capable of making our lives bearable. No matter where we live on Earth, the color of our skin, the nature of our thoughts, the valor of our hearts, the greatness of our souls, we all have in common this primitive dread born of earthly chaos, this suffering in the face of death, this terror in the face of time passing and never returning.

Displaying any superiority is not only confusingly stupid, but it is also absolute nonsense who would like to see in human beings whose destiny would be essentially different from others while the human condition in its primary attributes puts people, all people without exception, on a strictly equal basis.

We are neither Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, White, Black, Yellow, Chinese or Australian, but just individuals who show the same suffering and the same fears, living with the same lacks and the same solitude, go on the path of life, with no other desire than that of being spared as long as possible by the vicissitudes of existence.

Racism in all its forms, anti-Semitism, hatred of the other are all wounds that we inflict on ourselves in a kind of absurd ritual that contributes to our downfall. To be animated by such feelings is to leave the field of the human condition to enter the reign of barbarism when one frees oneself from living together to better lower one’s neighbor in a kind of existential stain which ends up lowering the all of humanity.

Fighting racism is not only fighting the worst injustices, that of birth and origins but also restoring the human being in all his greatness when he recognizes in the other his brother in pain, this the very idea of compassion without which the world could not exist. To deny it is to deny oneself, carried away in a headlong rush where exalted people of all stripes meet, those who without even knowing it seeks by lowering the other an outlet for their internal distress.

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Previously published on “Equality Includes You”, a Medium publication.

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