I loved the piece! I’m not unlike most Americans — we find norms and mores and palace intrigue among English aristocracy fascinating.

Mmm, no mea culpa, I think. Using Justin as an example — if he’s English this parallel track of careful black/white male/female social intercourse is a direct bi-product of early America, predating the abolition of slavery, and won’t apply to him. In fact, Lincoln spoke passionately against this very amalgamation, even going as far as to suggest slaves be geographically isolated or returned to our mother land.

After slavery, and specifically to de-incentivise Blacks, states across the new republic made the mixing of races criminal, punishable in practice without the virtue of courts. Court involvement made little difference, however, as depicted in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird.

Despite there being clear accounts and records that Whites were the catalyst in race mixing (Lincoln makes the case passionately), Blacks were savagely persecuted. I noted many examples here, but the two I’ll emphasize is Guy Bussey, of whom you already know, and Emmitt Till, a cautionary tale carried forward by all Black mothers and heeded by Black men.

We have, since the fledgling civilization of the Americas, lived under the largely false pure white rose doctrine for White women. When a White woman cries of a despoiling, Black men die. It is a phenomenon born, bred, and sustained in the American anthology, and has no parallel across the pond, as it were. Thus, again assuming Justin is English, the lack of this particular survival instinct — while inviable — is not of much consequence.

I suspect there is a sister version of the white rose on several African countries, but I would otherwise not see much to be made of its absence in the survival scheme of others.