Absolutely amazing article, accept many claps.

I am 61 (in a couple of days) and I spent thirty of those years in the United States as a white man.

The level of racism there is just astonishing if you're coming from elsewhere. And the other places I've lived are certainly not racism-free, but nothing like this.

I wondered if I were "whitewashing" the issues back here in Europe, but I was just talking a couple of days ago to a person of color here in the Netherlands who'd spent a month in the US and he felt even more strongly than I did.

Here's a story that I hope will make you happy. Before we left the US, we traveled a lot and one evening we were in the basement of some average pub in London where a group of (my guess) office workers were hanging out.

About ten minutes after we arrived, a cry went up, "Mike!" Someone named Mike had just showed up, and the group surged to meet him, he kissed a couple of the girls, he was clearly very popular.

Mike was Black, and yet there was no sense of the tokenism you see in the US: he was just one of the guys. It made me happy.

I realized that in thirty years, I had only seen this sort of thing amongst my music friends in New York City, nowhere else.