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 us had really thought of Trevor as being black before. (Well he isn’t really, is he? He’s like one of those cricket-playing Old Etonian maharajah types or those plummy-voiced African princes: whiter than any white person you’ve ever met.) But in Devon, the amiable, poetry-loving newsreader’s Trinidadian hues stuck out — or so it seemed in our paranoid imaginations — like a cobra at a mongoose wedding.