Race is a very sensitive topic, but there’s no doubt that racism is vile. The abuse of any person is abhorrent, but abuse aimed at an individual or group based on the colour of their skin is incomprehensible to me.

The action of the police involved in the killing of George Floyd in the US must be condemned outright and without reservation. Criminal proceedings are being pursued and I sincerely hope that it will deliver justice for the family. The same should also happen with any such killing here, or in any other country. It must be condemned; justice must be served.

I have to admit to finding the concept of different “races” a difficult one. Race is a social construct rather than a biological one. But that does not mean biologists have not written about or supported the idea of different races in the past. But as we gain more knowledge, as our understanding grows, so too must our views change.

In Victorian times writers and explorers thought nothing of calling any non-western people “savages”. Though not all were of that view. One of my scientific heroes, Alfred Russel Wallace, wrote he couldn’t understand why we label native tribes as ‘savages’ when their behaviour and social structures were, in his opinion, more civilised than many western societies.

Such societies he noted did not have the separation of groups into “rich” and “poor”. Food was shared and distributed equally among village members. People looked after each other, the older members of the tribes were considered wise and were revered. He contrasted this with social structures in Victorian society where we had not just a division between rich and poor but starving children dressed in rags.

Wallace spent time living with different communities, documenting their lives and learning their languages. Even Charles Darwin, who many mis-characterise as being in favour of slavery, persuaded the pro-slavery Captain of the Beagle to become an antislavery proponent by the time their voyage around the world had finished in 1835, only two years after the abolition of slavery act of 1833.

The pulling down of the statue of Edward Colston in Bristol shows the depth of feeling that is still evident when we have on display a “tribute” to a well-known slave trader who treated people as less than human. He was responsible for the deaths of thousands and the enslavement of many thousands more. The question we need answered is why such a statue had been left on display for so long? It wasn’t as if there hadn’t been campaigns for years asking for it to be removed.

That led me to wonder exactly how many statues and tributes in our towns and cities are there that commemorate former slave traders and dealers in human misery. I wasn’t aware of Colston, but I am now. It could be argued that the action taken was therefore a good thing. That said, I’d argue that we shouldn’t have to resort to civil disobedience to accomplish what should have been done democratically and legally years ago. This isn’t about erasing history, it’s about educating people.

Ideally what we need is a national audit of statues, and tributes to people in our towns and cities. Those identified as morally and ethically intolerable by today’s standards should be removed and placed in museums so that they can be a source of education.

The statues can have with them the accompanying context, the accounts of what really happened and they can be a force for good and used to educate future generations, rather than adorn our streets with people passing by having no knowledge or understanding of who these people were and what they may have done. Ignorance and silence about our past cannot remedy the hurt people who suffer racism feel. Leaving such “tributes” may also feed the racism that still exists.

As human beings we are one species, one race if you must use that term, the human race. Of course, there is variation in how we look and some of that variation will relate to where we live; a biological response to environmental conditions. There are also differences that go beyond how we look. Some areas are predominantly of one faith or another. Traditions that bind people together as a society will also change from one area to another this is ethnic diversity in one sense. Such differences when combined with natural variations in how people look are, in my view, what people try to use to define different races.

As Jane Elliot, the American anti-racism teacher asks her audiences regularly, “if you as a white person would like to be treated the way black people are in this society, stand up”. Nobody ever stands.