'Barbarism' is found either barefaced or concealed under synonyms. Among them 'identity' is experiencing increasing fortune. And next to 'identity', 'roots', but also 'ethnicity', with the ancestors 'nation' and 'nationality'. Words that have become common sense but can become stones because, like everything that serves to distinguish and become aware of separation, they contain a violent potential ready to justify civil aggression and wars. No definition, no matter how sharp and elegant, can prevent us from sensing behind this word, seemingly so simple and harmless, the deaf echo of the undertow of history and power relations that has resumed intensely doing its old job: it hurls peoples and individuals onto the most diverse shores, when it does not erase them by sinking them to the bottom of the sea.