Humans are pattern-seeking animals, consciously and subconsciously imposing designs and theories on to past events. We do this in both our private lives and when looking at history.

Since I began presenting programmes about black history my life has become a constant impromptu focus group. I am stopped in the street by people who want to talk about the histories those documentaries explore.

I was born in Africa but brought up in the north-east of England. Most of my childhood was spent living on a council estate that overlooked the Tyne and I went to the same junior school as Paul Gascoigne, of whom I have a vague memory.

What we're seeing is a backlash against any attempt, whether from the world of scholarship or popular culture, to paint non-white people back into the British past. Those of us who write about this history have long been familiar with this.

Most people involved in the delivery of history, in universities, publishing, museums and the heritage industry, are aware that we have a problem with diversity and inclusivity.

Even the building of a second British empire in the 19th century never fully healed the wound of losing America, and the end of Britain's imperial prestige after the second world war has cut deeper.

Britain in the 19th century was two things simultaneously; the hub of the largest empire on earth and the greatest manufacturing and trading nation the world had ever seen. Yet the formal empire and the trading empire were not the same thing.

Donald Trump did not cause America's democratic crisis of faith, he rode to power on it. Once in control, he and other populists discovered their room for manoeuvre was expanded by the same disillusionment that helped them into office.

By 1956, London Transport was recruiting in Barbados, even loaning migrants the costs of their passage to Britain. British Rail placed ads in the Barbados Labour Office and the NHS appealed to West Indian women to come to Britain and train to become nurses.

We nonchalantly expect that next year's smartphone will be faster and better than this year's, yet we struggle to imagine that society and our lives could progress at anything like the pace at which technology advances and we meekly accept it when things go backwards.

Britain fought the second world war with men and money partly drawn from the empire and that, after the defence of the home islands, the survival of the empire was a fundamental war aim.

The primitive fight-or-flight regions of our mammalian brains react to immediate danger. We instinctively run from an avalanche but the gradual retreat of a glacier, the portent of the far greater danger of rising temperatures and rising oceans, just doesn't get through to us in the same way.

Not only does the UK have the highest levels of regional inequality among the major economies, the imbalance is widening, not narrowing.

To describe someone as a pessimist is to issue an insult, whereas to be labelled an optimist is to get a pat on the back. To dismiss someone's argument as pessimistic is to suggest it is the product of a personality disorder, rather than careful analysis.

At 18, I stood in the Louvre in front of the paintings that TV had first shown me.

Each year when the A-level results come out, thousands of students and their families settle down to deal with the implications - positive or otherwise - of the fact that their actual grades differ from those they had predicted by their schools.

Schools unable to keep their lights on and their doors open for the full working week is just the latest bleak instalment of a long-running show. The age of austerity returns for its ninth miserable year; always in the background, the common denominator in everything from the Brexit vote to knife crime.

When I was a child, growing up on a council estate in the northeast of England, I imbibed enough of the background racial tensions of the late 1970s and 1980s to feel profoundly unwelcome in Britain.

I never had a black teacher or lecturer, I never once met a black British person who held any sort of professional or managerial role.

I've received tweets that I suspect people wouldn't have sent in 2015. Is that a changed country or is that people who are unpleasant feeling emboldened to speak?

As a historian, I always think you know what a moment was 20 years later.

I only ever wanted to do history, and make documentaries.

Historians are a long way from being key workers. The best place for them is at home, reading their books and keeping out of the way.

Ten Guinea Street is on a Historic England site.

It was through watching documentaries on the BBC in the late 1980s that I first became interested in art and history.

My first teenage holiday was spent touring the great art galleries of Europe after having been inspired by what I had seen on television.

When black Britons draw parallels between their experiences and those of African Americans, they are not suggesting that those experiences are identical.

While everyone knows that London is both big and overprivileged when it comes to spending, the scale of its dominance is poorly understood. London is not just the biggest city in the UK, it is the biggest city in western Europe. It is also the richest region.

When the banks crashed the global economy in 2007-08, it was they who received a bailout while the rest of us got austerity.

In the Britain of 2019, around a third of a million of our fellow citizens are homeless.

The age of national leaders, or candidates for high office, has never been automatically regarded as an issue for concern.

In the case of the second world war the distorting factor is not poetry but our seemingly insatiable need to view the war through the prism of national mythology.

Along with never having got round to writing down our constitution and having a monarch who legally owns all the swans, one of the things that makes the UK a bit of an outlier is our university admissions system.

I disagreed with my teachers on pretty much everything, including what grades I was going to get at A-level. I was sure I'd pass, they were convinced I'd fail.

From daycare to graduation, our education system stacks the odds against the poor. Predicted grades is just one of many hurdles that are set a little higher for those whose parents do not have the money to smooth their path in life or the inside knowledge of how the system works.

The old racism of imperialism not only rendered the postwar political elite unable to see black people as full British citizens, it provided them with a whole glossary of stereotypes and preconceptions that they then deployed in order to justify their aim of introducing immigration controls.

But Johnson's Churchill-lite shtick and Theresa May's even less convincing Iron Lady routine are only even vaguely viable because they tap into a fantasy version of British history that has contaminated visions of our conceivable future.

If you want someone to call you a traitor or accuse you of hating Britain, try suggesting that Britain is a normal nation or that our history is remarkable but not exceptional.

A hard Brexit would be so damaging to the true interests of the UK that what might follow - if we are lucky - is a great unmasking, not just of the political fantasists and chancers who peddled the great Brexit swindle, but of the historical delusion that empowered them.

The most extreme among the Brexiters are convinced they can ride the chaos and deploy the 'shock doctrine' to remake the nation in their ideological image.

It is of course perfectly possible for a university, or any institution, to carry out a rigorous investigation into the historical origins of its accumulated wealth, while at the same time putting in place systems to address modern inequalities of access and attainment.

Everyone is happy for the history of slavery to be investigated so long as the investigation examines the parts in which we look good.

Theories, books and ideas created within ivory towers had real-world consequences.

Racism is a belief system. It was assembled over centuries from many component parts - bits of biblical scripture, the propaganda of the slave-owning lobby and the pseudo-science of academics working in universities in Europe and America.

I am as much British, white and working class, my mother's background, as I am black and Nigerian, my father's heritage.

Talking about class and identity can be as divisive as talking about race and racism.

I have met other black and mixed-race people who were victims of racism, often far worse than anything I experienced, and who have taken a different path. They moved away from their home towns as soon as they could.

Public buildings, built from the rates and taxes paid by past generations, are being auctioned off by impoverished councils who need the money to pay the redundancies of workers they can no longer afford to employ. Many of these grand Victorian buildings will be turned into flats that most people will never be able to afford.

Even in London, at the centre of the wealthiest region in northern Europe, in so many ways insulated from the financial realities faced by the rest of the country, the facts of austerity are becoming harder to ignore.

Why go from the individual to the entire race, from the singular to the group, from the guilty to the innocent? We know why. That is how racism works. That is racism in action.