A leading figure in the black arts world recently introduced me to the term cultural taxation – once again, starting from America, this time from universities – which refers to how minorities are expected to take time out from what they’re supposed to be doing to get involved in matters of race. The taxation is that by voicing criticism of outmoded institutional ways that have damaged the prospects of minorities and then by seeking to come up with ways to fix them, the time which student or academic minorities spend on this take energy away from developing their careers, thereby holding them back.

You might say it’s a negative tax – by tackling inequality, they’re instead landed in its perpetuation.

In Britain, I see so many successful black and brown people who are cultural tax avoiders. I once asked a Bangladeshi businessman who had grown up in a Tower Hamlets council estate, got to university and developed multi million pound businesses if he would go back to his old school and tell kids his story to inspire them to follow suit rather than at best lead non-descript lives. His response was: “Why should I? Nobody did that for me.”

Similarly, I once e-mailed a famous black footballer if he would come down to Brixton with me where a mentee of mine, a former gang leader, had created a football club to get young kids engaged in sport rather than drift into crime. I got a long, angry reply asking why these kids get into this position in the first place and why was it his responsibility to steer them away from something that hadn’t appealed to him when growing up.

I was staggered on both occasions. But then I was staggered on another level recently with a former High Sheriff I had met to see how that office could better serve disadvantaged communities. In the course of our conversation she asked where I lived and when I said Dulwich, she actually asked why I don’t live in somewhere like Whitechapel, among people with low aspirations and help raise them. I think that would have been a punitive tax.

I’ve long wanted to see successful black and brown folk take more of an ownership role over the problem of race in Britain. It’s a fallacy to think that the state will fix this – on virtually every index, from worklessness to stop and search, the disparities of outcomes for ethnic minorities are only getting bigger. But maybe that approach is in fact flawed and it should be encumbered upon all people who have experienced success from challenging upbringings to be subject to the tax.

My friend who introduced me to the taxation term has spent his entire career fixing cultural inequality in the arts world, and has been successful in doing so, says it has drained him and jokes that he now needs a rebate.

What’s becoming clear is that the best way for the rebate to work is if the tax is applied evenly.