I cannot express how much I admire the moderate and rational tone you adopt to describe these mediocre circumstances. I would not be so restrained.

And in my experience it’s true — in thirty years in the US work world I never once saw three Black people standing together in the office (the music world alone was a different place where musicians in my experience really tried to be inclusive and “color blind”).

About six years ago, I was in some generic pub in London, where there were a group of office workers drinking — completely normal people. Someone came in the door behind me, and the whole crowd went, “Mike!” in more or less unison, flowed past me and went to greet Mike, who snogged a couple of the girls a little, who giggled, and then went to get drinks with arms around the group.

Mike was clearly a social center, and Mike was Black, and no one in this mostly white group seemed to notice this at all, and I realized I had only seen this in the United States in music circles. It made me happy to see it there in England.

A better world is possible and we live in hope and anticipation of it.