THERE’S a dark and ominous scar seared into the soul of America.
Trouble is, those of us brought up across the Pond and seeing that country through the rose-tinted lens of 1950s Hollywood thought that at least some of those wounds had been healed.
How could a nation captivated by the principled decency of Atticus Finch not have united in disgust at the racist brutality which sparked the civil rights movement and permanently banished the evils of segregation and prejudice to the dustbin of history?
But as the United States gears up to celebrate its 250th anniversary of independence in July, there’s no hiding the fact that racial intolerance is not something confined to the pages of the history books.
From the fatal shooting by an ICE agent in Minnesota that threatened to inflame an already contentious debate over immigration policy to images of an orange-hued president enjoying a round of gold with friends while American bombs fall on civilians abroad, it’s been a time when the world has had to recalibrate how it views America and its president.
And who better to explain just how dramatically the hard-won advances of the Sixties are being gleefully trashed in 2026 than journalist friend Joe Furey, a freelance specialising in longform narrative non-fiction who has been studying and writing about race in the United States for the past 30 years.
His Substack post from October 2025, Necessary Ghosts, contains some devastating insights into a country “whose power remains immense, but the symptoms of late empire are familiar: yawning inequality, paralysed politics, eroding faith in institutions”.
Prepare to be shocked: to be reminded of the thousands of lynchings that took place across this vast land, often with law enforcement lending a façade of legitimacy, along with the fact that the United States still locks up more of its own citizens than almost any other nation on earth, with Black communities still disproportionately impacted by 21st-century inequities in policing, prisons, parole and housing policies.
Joe’s 6,000-word post is not an easy read, but it is an important one. Racial injustice in America is no flashback to a distant past but a vivid reality haunting the country today, and a vivid reminder that the wealthiest nation on earth is also the one with the biggest racial wealth gap.
Thanks for writing this, it needs to be said.