Human dignity that becomes concrete

Berlin was a pioneer a year ago, but other countries could follow suit. The hard-fought work with the syllable drag in its name, the “State Anti-Discrimination Act”, which has been in force in the capital for exactly one year, has also given others a taste for it if they haven’t had it for a long time – Thuringia, for example, whose red-red Green government alliance had already written such a law in the coalition agreement – and will not get it through now because of early elections.

The new coalitions have agreed one in Rhineland-Palatinate and Baden-Württemberg. Yes or no to the legal regulation are not strictly based on political colors, as the media service Integration recently found out in a survey of the 16 governments. The red-green ruled Bremen and red-black in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania reject it, as do the Union-led states of Saxony-Anhalt and Bavaria. Hesse and Saxony are currently examining whether they need a law.

Amazing when you consider the downfall scenarios that accompanied the Berlin serve from the start. There was talk of general suspicion against the police, civil servants and clerks in offices would be turned into racists in a fluff, a wave of lawsuits prophesied. None of this happened in a year. And whoever reads the almost word-for-word debates when the General Equal Treatment Act (AGG) was passed, which came into force 15 years ago, can assume that it will not be in the future either.

Anyone who is allowed to use force for the state has to be careful

At that time, the employers’ associations were storming the law, this time (parts of the) police unions. Berlin’s police spokesman Thilo Cablitz recently opposed this calmly in a press conference: The LADG ultimately aims at “making human dignity more concrete. What could one have against it? “

Little can be added to that. Except perhaps that institutions that act on behalf of the state – such as offices, schools -, even as police officers, may use coercion and violence on its behalf, have to attract a little more critical attention than someone who is on a theater stage stands or sells milk.

Most people find it extremely difficult to even come close to being suspected of racism. It hits, even more than the accusation of having insulted women sexist, homophobically gays. Possibly because we are here in Germany and as a nation we have a genocidal history of racism that arouses shame as well as pride that we have “dealt with” it so supposedly so perfectly.

It would be time to finally admit to yourself that this is not possible. We haven’t even managed to eradicate anti-Semitism after twelve years of Nazi terror. He is even re-elected to German parliaments.

A chance to collect valuable knowledge

What 500 years of subjugation of the southern part of the world by the northern part has inscribed in our brains and feelings, the prescribed hierarchy of skin colors, racism, is even too big to cope with. And above all, it’s not an individual problem. It only looks like it because it can express itself personally and is then easier to grasp: in the disparaging remark about “the Turks”, in the “no” the landlady to a black apartment hunter. In police checks that only apply to dark-skinned people, or in the case of a failure to recommend a high school for a child from a Lebanese family, it is less tangible.

Anti-Semitism has not been abolished, unfortunately. But its public taboo has created awareness. This must now also happen with other forms of hatred, discrimination and racism. Institutions that promote this, be it laws or well-equipped, independent and competent ombudsmen or both, are the chance to broaden this awareness and thus possibly put an end to structural racism. That is the one who is not sitting in individual bad people, but everywhere in the wallpaper.

Doris Liebscher, the specialist lawyer at the head of the new Berlin regional office, is already recognizing “patterns” in the discrimination cases that arise in her and in the reactions to them. If you and your staff can process this material, even if work is being carried out on it beyond Berlin, valuable knowledge can arise about racist mechanisms, structures and how they can be overcome. For a community that is becoming more diverse and colorful almost every day. And that even today it can no longer afford to have the old wallpaper glued.