Importance of the Fight Against Discrimination

In a world that is increasingly conflictive and where there is no place for intermediate positions, it is often difficult to carry a message of peace and coexistence to the different societies of the planet. Both internal and external conflicts affect peace and make fear and xenophobia resurface with great force. That is why the fight against discrimination is always important, responsibility of all of us who inhabit this world.

living with strangers

Discrimination is a phenomenon that has always existed and is an essential part of life in society. It is even visible in some animal communities where specimens with certain characteristics they are abandoned or isolated. In the case of human being, there have always been justifications for different types of discrimination: by race or ethnicity, by religion, by illness or disability, by socioeconomic conditions, by physical features, by ways of dressing, by gender or by age.

In either case, discrimination makes one feel their life is like hell where anyone around them can attack them or put their lives in danger. The fight against discrimination ends up being essential to ensure everyone a good quality of life.

The danger of discrimination

Let's start from the fact of understanding that discriminating is not necessarily a negative term. In itself it means to separate, organize or classify. This, applied to human reality, can easily become a problem because it supposes that people can be divided according to various characteristics and with the complexity that our life carries on its back is almost immediate the act by which a group of people, feeling different from others, act with fear, aggression, violence or indifference.

Discrimination has generated the bloodiest massacres and tragedies in history, be it persecution, abuse, subjugation or even genocide that have been based on the absurd idea that such a people or community should disappear from the face of the earth. Discrimination, however, can also be invisible and take place within the same community with very simple attitudes that sometimes even go unnoticed or taken for granted and no one discuss.

Fighting these attacks is everyone's responsibility

Human societies are all made up of equally valuable, free and respectable people. In this sense, fight against attitudes that may be aggressive, derogatory or denigrating towards the members of our community or any other of which we are not necessarily part of is something that we all must do, otherwise we can be understood as accomplices of the attitudes criticizable.

Discriminating against a person because of their nationality or origin, their living conditions, their body or their gender, their age, their knowledge, their religion or culture, are all acts that must be repudiated and that speak of the baseness or cruelty of someone who has not yet adapted to the idea that everyone in this life is equal.

Images: iStock. Alejandro Rivera – Bastiaan Slabbers