
What idiocy it is to regard whiteness as a problem in need of a remedy
‘Oh please let no one call Trevor McDonald a nignog. Oh, please. Oh please!’ It was sometime towards the end of the 1980s (before Britain’s first black newsreader got his knighthood) and my brother, my sister and I were standing on the pavement watching the village carnival go by, each of us offering up the same silent prayer to the heavens. The place was Topsham, a village on the river Exe, a few miles outside Exeter, where our mother had just moved in with a lovely chap named Frank. Trevor was the local celebrity, the carnival guest of honour and also the Only Black Man In The Village. None of