It’s an unsettling moment when you realise you might be a racist. The thought occurred to me as I walked to my home in North London and I saw a group of black lads coming towards me. Instinctively, I crossed the road.

When I attended the worst comprehensive school in the worst achieving borough of London, I comfortably walked in a group of black guys just like the one that approached. I’ve never been mugged, or beaten up, or threatened by a stranger — black, white, white (other), or Asian. But I crossed the road because I was scared.

I searched the depths of my brown soul. Did I need to reconnect with my ethnic side? Allah forbid, had I become a racist? No, much worse, I’ve become middle class. When I talked to my middle-class friends, they saw my actions as responsible, reasonable, even natural. In contrast, I found them disturbing.

That’s because I should know better. At school I would have paid more attention to the trainers these black guys were wearing than their skin colour. Now I think: “You never see groups of middle-class white kids walking in groups that big, and at that time of night. These guys must mean trouble.” But they didn’t. If they had wanted my iPod they could have crossed the road and nabbed it. My crossing the road was a symbolic act, not a preventative one.

These prejudices are wholly without foundation. Although figures were not released, a Home Office report last year said that the findings from the Criminal Justice Survey suggest that black or black British people between the ages of 10 and 25 are no more or less likely to commit crime than their white counterparts. Asians commit even less crime.

Yet, despite this, black men, relative to the general population, are three times more likely to be arrested than whites.

Though the ethnic minorities make up only about 8 per cent of the population, an astonishing 24 per cent of the male prison population comes from that group, and 28 per cent of the female. Black people are not predisposed to being criminals — but the systemically racist criminal justice system helps to make them so.

So what was it that I was scared of? I realised that by crossing over to the dark, bourgeois side, I could no longer be part of their gang. By wearing the clothes they were wearing, and keeping the friends they were keeping, these lads were never going to fit in with my new liberal-thinking, olive-eating, mocha- drinking life. They represent the choices I did not make because I wanted to fit into the other, more upwardly mobile crowd.

That crowd may happily invite me to their dinner parties these days. But I would like to keep at the door the prejudices that may come with my step up in class.

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