With Black Lives Matter and the pushback to that campaign, plus the police murders of black men and the murders of police in retaliation, race relations are very much on my mind these days.

And I had a thought.  You know how the colour black is so often used as a negative – black hearted, black mood, blackmail, etc.  Well, I think it’s time we all stopped doing that and I’m going to try.

In China we called the unlicensed taxis that waited outside our gate “black taxis”.  This is not accurate.  Some of them were indeed black.  But really they were unlicensed.  That’s what we should have called them.

Black hearted?  Do you really mean evil?  Nasty?

Black mood? Are you talking about depression?

Blackmail?  Isn’t that extortion?

I think anybody with a descent vocabulary can find ways of describing the world without giving it a colour that is offensive to so many people.  I’m going to start.