My experience as a journalist has taught me that there are always stories to tell which can present a particular point of view without revealing the truth of the wider picture. It was just such a story, on what I felt was inaccurate reporting on the North London Broadwater Farm riots in 1985, which brought me into journalism in the first place.

My experience in life has taught me that far from black and white, the answers to questions of identity are invariably grey. What drives us towards the simple answers is the desire of so many people to have clarity and certainty in an uncertain world. In the end, the only thing in life that is certain is that life is uncertain.

As my career developed over the decades first at the London School of Economics and then the BBC, I recognised that there are legions of people who remain in denial on all sides of the so-called ‘race’ divide, who cannot help us heal the traumas of the past if they continue to live by the defunct codes of that past.

The language of race and racism are the unholy descendants of a false science. So how do we emerge out of the oppressiveness of the language of the past? What do we need in order to become a country that recognises difference, but accepts that the diversity of talent is not colour-coded? How do we ensure we can see the wood despite the trees? Does skin colour really explain everything in life’s experience? Do the headlines on racism continue to reflect the underlying story, or is it just good copy?