Surely we should be focusing instead on the positive qualities of the West, such as freedom, tolerance and Enlightenment values? But thanks to the creeping cultural Marxism infecting our government, authorities, schools and universities, these are sidelined in favour of this disproportionate preoccupation with racism.

We need to remember the correct definition of racism -- discrimination and irrational hatred against someone because of the colour of their skin. Racism is not applicable to religion, nationality or gender. Yet those who condemn Islamist terrorism or voted for Brexit are accused of racism. It has become the go-to word when protesting against an election result, a government decree or being passed over for promotion.

I don't deny that there are legitimate claims of racism in the West but the term is now so bloated and over-used it has become meaningless and minimises the anguish of those who truly suffered racism, both historically and contemporarily.

Very few Westerners are out and proud racists. Despite the constant bleatings of the George Soros-funded Black Lives Matter movement, the UK and the US are not racist dens of inequity. Both countries are light years ahead of other parts of the world because they have racial equality enshrined in law.

And if UK and US are such racist places, why are so many trying to migrate to both? When we let professional whingers moan about racism where it doesn't exist, the more complicit we are in allowing real racism to flourish unheeded. This enforced focus on perceived racism in the West means most are blind to real racial injustices in Africa, Asia and the Middle East, such as Bangladeshi slave labour in Qatar, abused Indian maids in Dubai and the growing Islamist slave trade in the Maghreb where black Africans are sold like cattle.

Racism in the West is minuscule in comparison with the horrific racism I witnessed growing up in apartheid South Africa. The belief that black South Africans were inferior to their white counterparts was sanctified and enforced by law and the fascist state. My fellow Africans truly suffered from the persecution created by racist apartheid. I remember mothers separated from their children for months at a time while they worked as domestic servants in white-only suburbs, their children banished to the dire 'homelands' and brought up by ailing grandmothers in tin huts with no heating or electricity.

I read how fathers lived in dormitories no better than cow-sheds and worked themselves to death in the gold mines. I saw grown men weep with frustration at having to lose a day's wages because they had to travel back to their 'homeland' to apply for their annual passbook -- a discriminatory system designed to track all non-whites and imprison them if not kept up to date.

I heard of people dying horrible deaths in the under-resourced and overcrowded black-only Baragwanath hospital. I witnessed suffocating smog rise from Alexandra Township each chilly Johannesburg winter morning, as thousands who lived in this crowded space lit their charcoal stoves to warm their shacks. I am old enough to remember the Soweto riots of 16 June 1976 when children my age were shot by police because they did not want to be taught in Afrikaans, the language of their oppressors. I also remember myriad orphaned street children begging for food, abandoned to their poverty and short lives because they were black and therefore deemed worthless by successive apartheid governments.

Because I have witnessed the true nature of racism and what happens when it is enshrined in law, unlike here in the West, I have no patience with those who wield the concept as a social engineering tool to squeeze out the last vestiges of our freedom of speech. Our academic, scientific and cultural heritage is rapidly being eradicated by those who scream racism where it doesn't exist.

Millennial bloggers claim 'textbooks were created by people who lived in a racist society', and those who should know better ban To Kill a Mockingbird because it uses the terminology of its time, despite it being a sensitively written tract against racism. We are swiftly descending into a new post-Liberal puritan age where egotistical virtue-signalling is destructively epidemic, and any dissenters are labelled racist and persecuted by zealots who ironically claim anti-racist credentials.

When social engineering tries to make us into something that we are not, the result is fear, oppression and chaos. Our useless police are a prime example of what happens when the obsession with racism overtakes sense. They have forgotten how to keep us safe from harm, preferring to paint their nails, parade around in high heels and scour Twitter for 'hate speech' while ignoring shoplifting and burglaries.

No matter how many our authorities imprison for the false crime of racism, the basic nature of human beings won't change. We are social animals and naturally ethnocentric. Our primitive ancestors learnt that to stay alive they had to rely on those familiar to them. They feared being killed by strangers who wore different clothes, ate exotic food or worshipped another god.

Thankfully we have come a long way from our ancestors who feared each other. Our primeval instinct to do so is still there, but thanks to science, our Judeo-Christian heritage and the Enlightenment, our sense of rationality and tolerance overcomes this. But we still have that tribal impulse to belong to a family, a community, a group. We tend to gravitate towards those who have similar life experiences and sometimes the same ideology, religion, race or culture, and we want the freedom to do so without being called racist.

The more we are accused of being racist and witness the dire consequences of being defined as such, the more reluctant we will be to defend what is left of our freedom. We need to lose this dread of being labelled racist when we are not. Otherwise, as we are already witnessing, our wonderful Western way of life will disintegrate into a Dark Age of irrationally, fear and persecution. And the letter 'R' will become the new scarlet mark of shame.

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