When everyone immediately senses racism at the slightest discordant note

Ferda Ataman takes her job seriously. In a series of interviews, the Federal Government's Anti-Discrimination Commissioner draws the public's attention to the fact that the specter of discrimination is lurking everywhere. she is right. Many grievances are overlooked or repressed. Only: In the endeavor to evaluate every transgression as an expression of disadvantage and disparagement, Ataman succumbs to the danger of making himself superfluous.

For example, anyone who says “All people are colored” is right. However, he stretches the concept so far that he turns it into a jellyfish among the concepts that – if you want to grasp it – sinks shapelessly into the sea of ​​nonsense.

Although Ataman doesn't push it that far, she is close when, in addition to the well-known minorities - Muslims, foreigners, refugees, the physically and mentally handicapped, homosexuals and queers - she now also looks at the East Germans, the poor and dedicated to the elderly. If the exclusion is so extensive that all sections of the population fall under it, then, as a logical consequence, there is no longer any discrimination. Ataman knows about the problem. But she doesn't care.

She prefers to indulge in the zeitgeist. In this zeitgeist, there are as many racisms as there are lobby groups that have to justify their existence. In this zeitgeist, the sexuality of a public official is more important than their ability and talent. In this zeitgeist, the great movement of emancipation has developed into an alphabet soup of identities, in which almost every representative of the respective group cultivates their own self-pity, immediately scents racism at the slightest discordant tone, and then ignites a shitstorm of insults themselves, which Opponents - better: the enemy! - to silence.

In this zeitgeist, a hard-won value of the Enlightenment has been suspended: the wonderful tenet that male, female, black, Jewish, Muslim, Arab, gay, and queer are qualities to be neither concealed nor glorified.

Discrimination is not the danger for Western societies – the rights of minorities are better protected there than elsewhere. It is the efficiency of this zeitgeist. It leads to racist anti-racism, the return of tribalism and the end of a culture of debate committed to truthfulness.