Regular readers of this column who saw my documentary Who You Callin' a Nigger? on Channel 4 last Monday will be familiar with the issues it covered, such as the hostility of Caribbean people in Britain to newly arrived immigrants, particularly Somalis, who have fought for and won refugee status.

I tried to draw a line between "Pakistani" and "Muslim" youths, definitions not always interchangeable. In Walsall, the former have broken from the traditional way of life and emerged with a violent aggression directed at West Indians.

This is what is really new: the depth to which some British Asians have sunk in their unbridled hostility to those who were once fellow immigrants. The old adage stands: you become - if only in part - that which you fought against. It is not inevitable, but only progressive and radical thinking protects you against the peril. For example, I remember that during the age of black militancy all the old immigrant groups were comfortable with the definition "black". But our friends from the Indian subcontinent came to prefer "brown" and "Asian", which put them nearer to whites in the colour coding.

Now, young Pakistani men have gone further and demand that they be referred to as Pakistanis, which by inference includes Islam, and implies a lighter shade of brown. This hierarchy of skin colour presumes that all Caribbeans are darkies, which places us at the bottom of the pile. It is a miserable process. Take the racial garbage spewed forth against West Indians in Handsworth. Add the stench of decay from the mouths of Caribbean people in their tirades against Somalis. We are all consumed.

Some claim the film ought not to have been aired. They include Nitin Sawhney, pioneer of a music that mixes drum'n'bass with qawwali. I could understand his grief: fusing the music presupposes a fusion in society. The current conflict between West Indians and Pakistanis in Walsall undermines his life's work. They also include Shahid Malik, who is on the Labour Party's National Executive Committee and has found a safe seat in Dewsbury. His response to the programme was to charge me with incitement to racial hatred. My reply is as follows: the programme represents the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth. Once the various communities accept this, we are halfway to solving it.