PUTTING oneself in another person’s shoes is one very good way of understanding their perspective. Yet it is something we rarely do.

I was brought up on that wisdom, but I was well into my 40s when I put it into practice in a very practical way. My partner was six foot three and I was five foot four. One day I stood on a step in our house and saw the dwelling as he saw it. It was clear that he experienced the space quite differently from me.

Getting down to a child’s height is also recommended if you want to make friends with them faster.

The rate at which we are moving away from the established world order, the one people of my post-war generation grew up in, is quite alarming. It is increasingly less liberal, less empathetic, and the everyday manifestation of that is the way we treat one another as human beings and what rights we imagine we are each due.

It is a paradox that as we have more information we have come to know less, but are more confident and strident in our ignorance. Nowhere is that truer than in the matter of “race,” which I reject except as a social construct. Biologists, geneticists and anthropologists know that race does not exist, yet it continues to be one of the most powerful drivers of illiberalism.

The heady electoral US goings on, crystallising in the Democratic convention last week, overshadowed the sinister and growing return of race as a major issue in the Republican camp, and we saw it too in Britain earlier this month, overlaid there with religious hatred.

Race science is also making a comeback. Just when we thought The Bell Curve was well and truly buried, the right is again linking race and IQ. They cannot prove the scientists wrong, so they talk about the inferiority of “the people and the spirit,” while cancelling the scientific proof. A recent article in the Atlantic magazine by Ali Breland made for worrying reading.

Apparently, the ugly, scurrilous ideas that gained currency during Trump’s presidency and were forced underground during the Biden presidency are now circulating more freely. For example, the Tucker Carson Show, currently broadcast from a barn in Maine and free of corporate scrutiny, is giving wide exposure to the unsavoury, irrational rhetoric. Elon Musk engages on X with a user who promotes a genetic link between black people and crime rather than historic socio-economic factors.

Although race science has not yet been adopted by Trump’s MAGA followers, the labelling of Kamala Harris as a DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) candidate contests her experience, education, innate and intellectual ability to lead the Democrats and the country. Her success is down only to her race and gender, they claim.

At the last count, in the US there were 99 historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs) in 19 states; 50 were public institutions and 49 were private non-profit institutions. Kamala Harris attended the highly-reputed Howard University. These are institutions, dating back to 1837, and all established before 1964, with the principal mission of