Here’s a thing. Many white people spend lots of money trying to tan themselves brown. Some of these people, on returning to Britain, turn out to be vocal racists, verbally abusing non white citizens.

This week the Bulgarian football manager, responding to the appalling behaviour of some of his national team’s fans, suggested that country’s problem with racists was less than the British one.

Anyone who watched the sickening sight of apparently grown men making Nazi salutes and uttering chimpanzee style noises aimed at three very talented black English footballers will doubt that.

But it would be idle to pretend we don’t harbour a group of people whose bigotry is matched only by their ignorance.

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If you’ve listened to the ranting “Tommy Robinson” – his street fighting name – or watched a skinheaded mob march under the banner of the so called English Defence League you cannot doubt that.

Happily, thus far, their tartan equivalents seem to have trouble assembling more than three men and a dug. But there is no room for complacency in a Scotland still scarred by sectarianism.

Then we had the absurd stushie over the BBC’s breakfast presenter Naga Munchetty, censured by some middle ranking bureaucrat for daring to suggest President Trump was likely to incite racism. Not exactly a news flash.

But she also made the very pertinent point that, like so many other black and brown Britons, she had suffered the regular indignity of being asked where she came from. Or worse still, in the rancid post Brexit referendum atmosphere, being told to go home.

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This is something with which many people of colour are only too familiar. Our own Makar, Jackie Kay, brought up in douce Bishopbriggs, was often asked where she came from when she was a youngster. “Glasgow” didn’t seem to satisfy her questioners.

The situation in America is a hundred times worse. The Black Lives Matter movement grew out of a long history of black men being killed by those hired to preserve law and order.

The mixed race son of the Mayor of New York wrote recently of “the talk” that all black parents have with their sons. How to act super polite and cringingly subservient when questioned by any police, lest they became the latest black corpse.

A white policewoman has just been given a 10 year sentence for going into the wrong apartment and shooting dead its black owner.

Black people convicted of minor crimes are serving much longer terms. A black woman was shot dead this week by police while playing with her nephew.

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Historically, across the world, for no logical reason I can discern, white-skinned people have persuaded themselves that their pigment renders them in some way superior.

They are dangerously deluded.

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