America’s fierce guilt for slavery is understandable – we mustn’t import it

I love American roadtrips. They are the ideal way to visit 96 per cent of the country, which is determinedly built (for good or ill) around the desires of the car driver. The brilliant roads, the endless motels, the hideous car lots that blight most of the cities (making parking a doddle, even if they ruin the actual towns), they all ensure that driving is easefully delightful.

A roadtrip is also the best way to understand America, and my recent trip along and around the Mason-Dixon Line – the great geographical/political divide which once (still?) sunders the old Union states from the old Confederacy – taught me the depth, strangeness and profundity of white America’s guilt: vis a vis America’s slaving past.

The peak moment of eeriness probably came at sunny, splendidly situated Monticello, Virginia, which is the Unesco-listed estate designed and inhabited by the American founding father, Thomas Jefferson.