David Olusoga

History suggests that the disillusioned and the disaffected do not readily take to the streets nor man the barricades to defend a system that failed to defend them.

No matter that you're a British citizen, no matter that you were born here - your skin colour means you do not have the same rights as others to express critical opinions about your own country.

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.

Black history is a series of missing chapters from British history. I'm trying to put those bits back in.

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.

Our national history cannot be national if, in the near future, one in three young adults feels their stories remain untold, if this country's long global history of empire and interconnections is marginalised and if the historical reality of race is rendered almost invisible.

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.

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.

Because racism is not like jealousy or selfishness, it is not a primal urge or a basic instinct, it is a 400-year-old political and economic system that has infected our institutions, our culture and even our thinking.

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

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.

For black and Asian people of my generation, the England team and the cross of St George were once ingredients in a toxic broth. For decades, a minority of England fans brought the nation and the national team into disrepute, bringing violence both to foreign streets and immigrant communities at home.

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.

What needs to be debated is whether IQ tests, as currently designed, are fit for purpose, and capable of measuring the changing nature of intelligence in the 21st century among generations brought up with digital technology and different learning habits.

Racism is not primal or instinctive.

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.

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.

In my school, racism was ubiquitous and unrelenting, and not just from the pupils. For a year I was terrorised by one of my teachers.

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.

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

My view as a historian is that the empire was an extractive, exploitative, racist and violent institution and that the history of empire is one we need to confront and come to terms with, rather than celebrate.