Not black & white

John Hughes is right – it is wrong that the historian Michael Fry was removed from the committee in Edinburgh preparing the plaque to explain St. Andrew Square’s Dundas statue (Letters, 7 May). But its chairman, Sir Geoff Palmer, had already undermined his objectivity by ascribing a “racist element” to the medics’ reaction when his wife gave birth to their firstborn in 1977 (report 11 March).

As he was not present, and the staff did not know he was Jamaican, of course they were a “little concerned” that the baby’s colouring might indicate something “medically wrong” ( just as in 1942 my mother’s medics recognised something was wrong with me as a “blue baby”). He then linked this, out of context, with David Hume’s brief, nuanced footnote about non-whites’ “inferiority”, said “this is the statement that killed George Floyd” (though whites die in similar circumstances) and led “to the incident that Meghan and Harry talk about” (about which he and we know almost nothing).

It seems unlikely his committee will acknowledge that the Atlantic slave trade depended on local chiefs selling their fellow-africans, or that over a million Europeans were captured into slavery by north-west Africans.

In “Inside Health” (6 May) about the tragedy of India’s current Covid wave, Dr Gwenetta Curry, university lecturer on race, ethnicity and health, makes the facile statement that it is “racism and the residual impact of colonialism” which has prevented India from protecting its own citizens despite its position as the world’s largest vaccine producer. She ignores that it surged under two months ago, after huge religious gatherings, crowded election rallies, sports events and reopened public spaces were allowed.

Too often “white racism” is the default knee-jerk reaction to too many such disasters.

JOHN BIRKETT Horseleys Park St Andrews, Fife