This is an extremely eye-opening article, Gabriel, and written with a courageous frankness that America needs. This is an atypical approach for an American discussion. I have always been curious to know who in America would start the discussions that are necessary for Americans to understand each other but the answer is clear: each one of us. You have done your part so let me try to do mine.

Floyd Mayweather and 50-Cent are just men. They do not own a race and they are not owned by a race other than the Human Race. If by “their own race” you mean a cultural grouping with which they feel closely associated, then, of course, I have no debate to offer but my inclination of thought here is that you, like many, are referring to the biological feature of complexion as a basis for this division.

America’s definitions of race are gravely outdated and still based on the most primitive notions of slavery. This is precisely why an American police officer finds it easy to look at a black man and say, “I don’t care about your people.” Yet, a police force is an organisation one would wish had the couth and open-mindedness to serve everybody objectively and with a human heart.

Kanye West, a black man, is married to a white woman, Kim. If I am a white police officer and stop Kanye for a traffic violation do I walk up to the car and think, “Ah, there is Kanye, and my sister Kim!” This is an exaggeration, of course, but it serves a purpose: Kim is no more related to me than she is to a panda in Chengdu, China. If anything, she is a member of Kanye’s family or, if you wish, race.

The word race, for me, infers a relationship on an exclusive biological basis. For that matter, complexion is not exclusive because it gives us no special distinctions as men and women. We would like to claim that some people are better than others because they have straight toes and others are inferior because they have curly toes. Yet all sorts of configurations and Venn diagrams depicting them are possible.

Black on black violence? Where else would such a tragic and meaningless categorisation be possible other than in a province of historical slavery and slave trade? Across the world now, this feature has forced legal redress in such terms as “hate crime.” Is murder not hateful when a man kills his wife because he has found a younger mistress? People love people where they live and, similarly, they hunt and kill where they live.

It wouldn’t make sense to travel across Chicago to kill a white man for his wallet unless, of course, the motivation for doing so is that the takings are much more likely to be worth the effort because some parts of Chicago are richer than others.

If you are a petty criminal, you are likely to be too lazy to worry even about getting caught in your local neighbourhood. Thinking is too difficult a challenge for many criminals so it will be simple enough — for robbery and murder — to operate locally. When you have perfected your art, you are much more likely to seek to operate nationally.

These musings are comical, yes, but I hope they show that America cannot be a country that calls its citizens equal but still find it convenient to group them in various races and sub-races. I was stunned, when I arrived there as a student, to see the different “complexion classes” into which the population could be divided. What did this achieve?

Nothing but I could see why, in a society that had been reared on a diet of notional white fears and black violence, and the idea that white women stood to be raped and molested by young, black men — a feature that is also a repugnant remnant of the era of slavery and slave trade — this had been an inevitable destiny for America.