Warning against discrimination: Old people, parents and children are also discriminated against – this can be addressed

It’s crass: It doesn’t matter what the anti-discrimination commissioner of the federal government, Ferda Ataman, says – it is very quickly turned against her. One is tempted to say: someone is being discriminated against. But that would only obscure the view of what ataman wants to say, what she wants to point out, with a sottise. There’s nothing funny about it anyway. Yes, that’s right, to start with: if a majority, for example, belittles a minority group, then there will certainly be unanimous talk of discrimination. Anyone who has had to endure a comment about something at some point is not fundamentally discriminated against.

Contempt is also a danger

Many have had this experience. It is therefore necessary to warn against this danger in their interest: to underestimate, to underestimate how many citizens are and can be affected. From this point of view, Ataman is right to sharpen the view for everyday life. That works better, let’s call it: emphasis, emphasis, getting to the point, thinking in headlines.

In the case of newspapers, mentioned in passing, the constitutional court once declared this permissible in the past. Well, according to surveys, 16 percent of citizens have experienced discrimination in the past few years. That’s “an extrapolated 13 million people,” says Ataman to the “Redaktionsnetzwerk Deutschland”. Not a small number, is it?

Age discrimination is also a phenomenon

Women, people with disabilities (or better: impairments), people from immigrant families, queer people – they can all sing a nasty song about it. All and all taken together, you definitely get more than 16 percent, more like 60. Especially since the issue of age discrimination is also coming up. With the average age of society, it logically also increases. If you are over 60, you will hear something about it – and it will not be easy for you to get the job you would like to have. Or kept.

Ataman speaks to another group, and they are to be thanked for in this aging society: Even between the phases of life “one can experience discrimination because one has children, takes care of parents or becomes chronically ill”. Who should speak out if not the anti-discrimination officer? If not she, who can do that with reverberation? And be it that all sides take what has been said very differently at first.

Pensions, care, parental leave – a look at the aspect of discrimination does no harm in government action, on the contrary. One could also say that this is part of justice, of social justice. Incidentally, this also applies to pointing out that there are still wage and position gaps between West and East more than three decades after unification.

Anyone who speaks of alarmism, like the Union, talks more lightly than the commissioner. Anyone who declares their warning to be a distorted image tends to have a distorted perception themselves. It’s just that if you want to change, you have to let reality sink in first.

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