THE TAXI DRIVER looked like one of those men I’d grown up seeing in photographs in the weekly edition of the Daily Mirror. An ordinary-looking middle-aged man, maybe in a feature about a punter who had won the pools and had been seen in his local pub buying pints for his mates.

I was totally taken aback when, as I gathered up my raincoat and bag to leave the taxi, he said to me, ‘Go on back to the jungle, we don’t want your kind over ’ere.’ Cold as you please.

This was my first visit to England, ‘the Motherland’, and I’d been having a grand time up till that point.

I was, to say the least, shocked. And then something happened that I’ve never been able to explain. Right after he said those words I said, ‘Thank you. Thank you very much for being so kind. You are the nicest, most polite person I have met since I’ve been here.’

I do not know how or why I responded in that way, but I realised immediately that those words had a strange effect on the driver, for he just stared blankly back at me and said nothing.

I got out of his vehicle and walked away, then turned and looked back to see the cab still parked in the same spot.

Knowingly or not, he’d dropped me off at the wrong address, and as I walked to my destination I kept looking back and seeing that the cab was still parked there at the exact spot where he’d dropped me off.

This was not the first time in my life I’d been at the receiving end of open racial abuse. Growing up in Jamaica I was always fully aware that Jamaicans practise their own shameful terrible forms of colour prejudice and that darker skinned Jamaicans were often considered less-than in a culture where people would say things like ‘anything too black never good,’ about their own selves.

But give thanks and praises to Marcus Garvey and to Rastafarians, who insisted that Black is Beautiful so there was something of a built-in corrective to that bullshit sel-fhating thinking that many Jamaicans wrestle with. That terrible self-hatred that manifests itself nowadays in skin-bleaching. Still, I insist there have always been Jamaicans who are very proud of their dark skin. ‘Mi black but mi comely, a so di Queen a Sheba tell king Salaman, and me black and me well comely,’ I once heard a woman on a street in Kingston say.

But back to where we left the London taxi driver.

To this day, I do not know why I said those words, instead of cursing back at him, which anybody who knows me knows that I am well capable of doing. In fact, that incident seemed to open the way for two other similar incidents (these tests always seem to come in threes) that I responded to in entirely different ways.

A few days after the taxi incident, I went, with two Jamaican friends (one whose name is Canute, yes, like the king who tried to stay the waves) to the theatre to see Catch My Soul, a musical inspired by Shakespeare’s Othello. At the intermission, I went to the ladies’ room, and while I was in there I heard the woman who was in charge of cleaning the bathrooms say to someone waiting outside the door, ‘There’s a nigger in there.’

When I came out, I said ‘I heard you’; and then I said something I am now ashamed of, I said, ‘What can I expect? You clean toilets.’ Even then, I knew that there were perfectly decent people who clean toilets, but she was not one of them.

The next incident had to do with an advertising campaign for Australia. I had been assigned to a creative team at McCann who were working on a campaign for the Australian Tourist Board. I was happily contributing my opinions on copy and layout for the ads but when the day of the presentation came around I noticed everyone behaving awkwardly. The copywriter, whose name I do not remember, who was a light-skinned Indian woman, took me to one side and said ‘Look, neither you nor I will be going into the presentation, because Australia has a “Whites Only” policy.’ And there and then I remembered a sentence in one of my reading books at primary school that said – I swear it was written down there for us to read – ‘Australia is a white man’s country.’ I responded to that incident by taking off early and walking around Kensington Market and deciding that I would never visit Australia. I still have not done so, but maybe I’m changing my mind about that. Especially after having spent so many years of my life living and working in the USA and Canada where I have grown used to random acts of racism: like the drunk in New York who spat at me in the street (luckily, he missed) and called me the N word. If you want to know what the temperature in the Arctic feels like, try being the only Black person in a room in some places in Canada.

But I still have to say that I was genuinely shocked that there were so many people in the state of Michigan, where I lived and worked for over twenty years – surely I met some of them – who voted for the 45th president and who still support him even after he failed to condemn tiki-torch bearing, hate-spewing neo-Nazis, and after what he said about immigration from Haiti and Africa and places where Black people come from.

I recently saw a brilliant documentary on James Baldwin, whose acuity of voice and vision is even more relevant today than before.

I am haunted by the story of Sandra Bland, who gets pulled over by a policeman who claimed she switched lanes without indicating, and who days later ended up hanging in a jail cell. All that I could do was write a poem.

There are days when I admit to being genuinely afraid when I watch the news.

Maybe it is alright for me to go to Australia now.

Racists are everywhere. Jesus help us.

But fortunately, so are beautiful, righteous, decent, generous and loving people and I am lucky to call many such people friends and colleagues. Gracious, warm-hearted, loving, upright, caring human beings who live in Britain and in every state of the USA and all over Canada and just about everywhere I have ever been, and whom I am sure, greatly, thankfully, outnumber the vicious crazies with their tiki-torches and their hate and spite spit and worse, way worse, their guns and ammunition.

These are scary times. God help us.