In late March, the high commissioner for Barbados, Guy Hewitt, called a lunch to discuss an urgent challenge. It had been several months since Amelia Gentleman’s first Guardian story about Paulette Wilson, who left Jamaica for Britain when she was 10, raised a family, had worked in a restaurant in parliament and was now threatened with deportation because of the hostile environment policy.

Stevenage was not built for speed. With all the confidence of the government and the generation that won a war and created the welfare state and the NHS, those who planned the town resolved that traffic flow would be best managed not by traffic lights but roundabouts. There are close to two dozen of them, making directions from London to the house I grew up in quite straightforward: count six roundabouts off the A1 and then take the first right.

At last year’s Guardian Opinion Christmas party – modest affairs at which those who want to dance are outnumbered by those who want to talk by at least five to one – I met Chibundu Onuzo, a Nigerian author.

At the beginning of this week it was difficult to imagine that Theresa May could be any weaker, her party behave any more recklessly or the country appear any more shambolic in the eyes of the rest of the world. It’s only Thursday and we’re already setting new lows.

When I first came to live in the United States from the UK, the most common question, particularly from African Americans, was: “Where was it best to be black?” I would usually qualify my response by making it clear that it’s not morally possible to weigh up whose racism is better before using my autobiography as a vehicle to try and answer the question.

On 1 February 1960, 17-year-old Franklin McCain and three black friends went to the whites-only counter at Woolworths in Greensboro, North Carolina and took a seat. The humiliation of growing up black in the south had left the teenage McCain contemplating suicide. Having spent the previous night chastising the older generation for their failure to effectively confront segregation, the four young men had talked themselves into an act that was brave, reckless, exhilarating and, ultimately, liberating.

“The very serious function of racism is distraction,” Toni Morrison argued in a lecture in Portland, Oregon, in 1975: