To mark the event many writers around the globe suddenly remembered that they were black and that society; i.e. Western society owed them all sorts of reparations and apologies for the horrors of the slave trade, and of colonisation. More dangerously, they have sought to explain the troubles facing black families and black society as a whole as a legacy of slavery. The violence, the crime often internecine, the gangs, the ghetto culture all of it, is the curse of slavery.

At the vanguard of this pseudo-intellectual thrust is the idea that the horrors visited on the ancestors of the modern black populations of the United Kingdom, the United States of America and the Caribbean have not been fully washed away by years on end of laws and institutions that have sought to undo the damage that Western society has by and large confessed it committed against its black people. Granted that in the main, the black population of the Western hemisphere are underprivileged and live much harder lives than their fellow citizens.

However, a dangerous strand of thought seems to permeate the discussions on black history. There was a time when pseudo science dictated the genetic inferiority of the black man. It was suggested that the black man had been adapted by nature to proficiency in some tasks even as he was woefully inadequate in others. Obedient, mindless, faithful, given to emotional outbursts, deceitful and childlike the black man was seen as cursed by heaven. The Hamitic myth was shown as proof of Providence's abomination of the black race and that the rest of mankind was bound by piety to rescue the fallen children of Ham from their dungeon of ignorance and service to the devil.

If this is making you angry, you may want to get even angrier when I tell you that many black writers seem, quite perversely to ascribe to these thoughts. Perhaps I overstate my case. These writers have fashioned a new narrative, equally repugnant and just as racist, to explain the situation of the modern black society. As an African, presumably, you will be even angrier to learn that they do not care to differentiate between the black populations that suffered the scars of slavery and the millions more who did not. In this rendition of The White Man's burden, the children of Ham are genetically predisposed to be overly aggressive males, to be abusive fathers when present, but more likely to be absentee fathers. Restless and slaves to the dreams of their oppression, they are given to adopting an aggressive-competitive mentality that allegedly explains the high incarceration rates among black males in the USA and the UK.

There's stuff in the family and home which is also a result of slavery. Men were not allowed to be fathers but were used to breed to create more slaves. It's something that - not with everyone - is common in the black community, especially in our generation: the fathers are not always there. We're not that far away from slavery and that way of living, where a man is literally just a tool to reproduce.'

That the slavers used the best male slaves as studs and that the women were of most value as breeders of new slaves is used to explain why the black Diaspora seems overly sexualised both in its art forms and in its appreciation of the human form. The natural desire for liberty is said to have morphed in these descendants of slaves into a desire to rebel at any authority. Black youth then make for poor students, and their innate feelings of separation from society. A law of divide and rule between the darker and the lighter slaves is blamed for 'disunity' in the black community and for the obsession with light skin prevalent in black communities.

Every last problem in black society it seems can be explained by the fact that hundreds of years on, the descendants of black America and black Britain still live in a prison, haunted by dreams of their ancestors' terrors. Many will no doubt think that there may be some truth in these assertions, especially given that the publishers of these allegations are well-meaning, well-educated people.

How useful is it however that a whole race of people persist in a perpetual victim-hood. And if slavery and colonisation destroyed the collective black conscious to this degree, how much more will it be destroyed by centuries of teaching black children that they suffer no agency and that instead they like prisoners can sit back in the knowledge that the system is unfairly skewed against them, and their striving is a chasing after the wind. The enemy is the dear, dear lie of White Supremacy that you hold so close.

As a black person who works hard for everything that I have, who struggles every day against institutional racism and historic disadvantage, I believe I much better off not thinking that I am congenitally disadvantaged as well, thank you very much.