Dear Sir,

In a recent blog in a discussion on Mary Prince and the naming of the Hospital Mary Prince, Andrew Outerbridge wrote: “Good Idea as a fitting acknowledgment to a past swept away.” (RG, Sept 4)

The unfortunate fact is that our past is very much with us in our two-tiered society. It is only the privileged who so blithely assume that our “past is swept away”.

Then they do not have to take responsibility for the extent to which it is still with us as the result of a deliberate policy of segregation and economic exclusion of those who were once enslaved (and it did not matter that they were house slaves rather than plantation); nor did it exempt those blacks who had themselves owned slaves!

Yours etc,

EVA N HODGSON