There is a secret inside Anne Frank’s diary: two pages of musing about “sexual matters” written in 1942 by a 13-year-old girl, and hidden with brown paper so they could not be found. But they were found with digital technology and are now published. The dead girl who wanted to be a journalist had one more unwilling, posthumous scoop. “Anne Frank’s secret diary entries reveal more thoughts on sex and prostitution,” said Newsweek.

I am squeamish about Anne Frank’s diary. I prefer to read Holocaust memoirs by adults who knew the ending to their stories: Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel. Frank didn’t write for publication – in fact the idea of it disgusted her – and I do not want to know the ending to her story if she didn’t. That is not enlightenment, or empathy. That is frisson, and sentimentality. Writers use, and summon, pain for their art. That is normal. But Frank had no such agency. Her pain was inflicted on her and, whatever apologists might say, her voice was heard against her will. Young enough to move us but too young – or too dead? – to choose for herself? Where does that leave her? I can forgive her father, Otto Frank, who lost his whole family and published the diary, but no one else.

But it is out now, and defended, in cold, banal, dehumanising language by the trio of institutions that made the discovery. They acknowledge that Frank’s musings about sex are, by themselves, worthless – how could they not be? – by invoking the development of the writer she would never grow up to become, and comparing her to Rembrandt, and Franz Kafka. “It’s not always good to follow the wish of an author,” said a spokeswoman. “It’s important sometimes for scientific research and also good to know for the public what she didn’t want to publish.” There is nothing “good” about this story, I don’t care about the public here, and if we are really talking about “scientific research” – that is, if the diary is now more important than the child who wrote it – then what was it ever published for?

But it is done, and so the least we can do for Anne Frank is to ask: is it meaningless? Does her diary have anything to teach us? It is easiest to say that it could have done, but it hasn’t. Like the little girl in the red coat in the film of Schindler’s List who was not a character but a signpost, if you need to see a face, or read a diary, to learn humanity you are probably unteachable. Look around: African-Americans fear for their lives doing ordinary things. Islamophobia is called a myth. Holocaust Memorial Day is marked each year by a grumble that the Jews take all the victimhood for themselves, in order to more effectively murder others.

Anti-racist education has failed, and those who practise it are in despair. One educator I know well feels her life’s work has been for nothing because, when economics intrudes we revert, always, to the old and familiar furies. Dehumanisation of the other is the essential component of genocide and it is endemic even among the fortunate, fuelled by new ways of communicating, which are actually the opposite: “snowflake”, “zio”, and now “gammon”, an anti-white slur used by people who call themselves progressive but in this instance aren’t.

In this babble, we are supposed to hear the clear, innocent voice of the child from her attic, and understand our evil and repent. But there was no such happy epilogue. If the diary was taken, and used, to demonstrate humanity, it has, in every sense, failed.

• Tanya Gold is a freelance journalist