The Torah says:
לא תאנו איש את עמיתו
“Do not utter empty words (דברי אונאה) between a person and his neighbor”.
These words, drawn from social attitudes, may include physical or behavioral prejudices that lower the value and dignity of another human being.
These words lead to paying less for work or subjecting certain people to daily psychological pressures. We eventually come to expect certain people to correspond to the prejudices established against them. Africa can typically inspire admiration, envy, jealousy, and also fear. Different results are imposed on the same social data.
To be black is to have the opportunity to experience it. An offer of employment, a proposal for domiciliation, a meeting with the legal or educational order can pivot entirely when epidermal pigmentation intervenes in these social relationships, and this to the disadvantage of Africans. These facts, undeniably experienced daily by millions of individuals of Black skin or of African origin, are often denied or minimized, and the social wounds engendered by these attitudes become accepted as a fait accompli, as if suffering were naturally part of a certain identity profile. Denying Africans entry to certain countries is one of these accomplished facts, which the whole public is supposed to passively accept.
In this specific case, even the religious milieu is no exception.
Whether you are Jew, Christian or Muslim, applying for a visa to pilgrimage to the holy places of your religion includes this epidermal and geographic filtering which Africans should expect. To be black is to be entitled to special treatment from those who consider that Africans have a special status.
Behind these treatments and their automatisms turned into social reflexes, there is a history, but also a psychology. The story is that of war and colonial conquests, for human resources and commodities extracted from African soil. It is also the story of the many elements of language that follow these kinds of wars. But the psychology is that of a constant repression, faced with a reality yet shared by the different actors of the same urban community.
Anyone who has Black friends or family members is a living witness to these interactions.
All Africans are subject to the same social examinations in a European environment.
We must either submit to these criteria which functionally redefine us as imitators of non-Africans, or else our place in human society is questioned and scrutinized.
When we ask chosen people to do the impossible to obtain what we offer to others without problems, we create a gap between the human and his spiritual dimension.
This discrepancy eventually becomes apparent, and can become ideological, to the point of creating the phenomena of resurgence of racist extremism and recuperative deviations from all sides. Those who have abandoned the fight against racial discrimination have forgotten how many human lives caught up in hatred this struggle commemorates. Their forgetfulness is responsible for the moral failure represented by the resurgence of hate speech and fratricidal nationalism. But Africa is the land of tomorrow.
The night will soon end. Africans are those who by their light their youth and their vitality will announce to the world that borders are no longer useful.
For it was for them that they were traced, and it is for them that they will be erased.
The soul of the Black Jew shines
