Racial segregation is back in the US. That old foul practice that most of us thought had been done away with by the 1964 Civil Rights Act has been given some politically correct spit-and-polish. Jim Crow’s gone woke. Consider the University of California, Berkeley. A student house there has decreed that white people are forbidden in its common areas. People of colour, the house says, must have the right to ‘avoid white violence and presence’. Therefore, no honkies allowed. The colour line resurrected to protect allegedly fragile blacks from devilish whites.

This is happening at the Person of Colour Theme House, one of Berkeley’s off-campus, privately run student-accommodation blocks. The house’s rules on guests stipulate that ‘White guests are not allowed in common spaces’. Anyone who brings a guest to the house must announce publicly ‘if [the guest] is white’. Warning: white person in the building! The POC Theme House has a reputation for racial craziness. One former resident says its ‘call-out culture’ is off the scale. Residents are often criticised for ‘being white / white passing, aligning themselves with whiteness, or allowing white violence in the house’. Sounds a lovely place to live.

I’m pretty sure Michael Graham wrote Redneck Nation as a warning, not a how-to guide.