Izabel Florence, 27
Meet Izabel.
Some differences are temporary and others definitive but what distinguishes and enhances every human being is diversity, a factor that too often is used instead as a tool to discriminate individuals who have different uses and customs from ours. Humans are systematically divided and categorized into "races" based on their physical features, geographical origin, descent and genetics. The real problem arises when the ultimate goal of this classification is aimed at elevating an ethnic group over one or all the others, thus leading it to take a privileged position among the circles of a hypothetical hierarchy. Racism, an inexact classification and by definition non-empirical, therefore derives from the identification and comparison of all the characteristics observable in different individuals and, consequently, in the different evolutionary declinations of the human race so as to be able to define the "value" of an ethnicity. In our time, there is no universal scientific consensus regarding the adoption and truthfulness of these divisions which instead find in the political context the most suitable terrain in which to proliferate. Among the pages of human history there are innumerable clashes between peoples in which xenophobia and suprematism played a fundamental part, leading in the worst cases to the extermination of entire ethnic groups. Slavery, genocide and human trafficking all derive from racial selection, among other causes.
Everyday we see what happens when this phenomenon takes place within our society: a word that should indicate a group of individuals who cooperate and collaborate and yet, in our time, we see an increasing in discrimination based events. As never before, we feel the distance and we fear the "other". These differences are almost never a source of enrichment and, on the contrary, we are increasingly distancing ourselves from a solid union of cultures and ethnicities, to the demolition of barriers which, in most cases, are solely the result of our ignorance.