It is hard to watch the events now unfolding in the small Louisiana town of Jena without being reminded of the eerie lyrics of Strange Fruit, the song immortalised by Billie Holiday in 1939, which condemned American racism by using graphic imagery to describe the lynching of African Americans in the US's reactionary and backward Deep South: "Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze/Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees."

The chilling drama currently playing out in Jena starts, almost incredibly in this day and age, in the local high school yard with a "white" tree, effectively reserved for white pupils so that they can benefit from its cooling shade. A black student dares to stand under it and the next day - this is where hairs stand up on the back of the neck - three nooses are found hanging from its branches. Not surprisingly, black students take exception to this obnoxious symbol of Ku Klux Klanism, and a series of sporadic racial incidents and fights between black and white students ensues.

The outcome had a ghastly predictability about it. No charges have been brought against white students, although they are implicated in attacks on blacks, yet six black teenagers - known as the Jena Six - stand accused of attempted second-degree murder, despite the fact that their supposed victim, who they claim taunted them with racist insults, appears to have sustained no lasting injury.

It is heartening to see how the Jena Six have mobilised black America, with thousands of peaceful and dignified demonstrators, dressed in black, descending on the time-warped redneck town on Thursday, showing their resistance to the racist rough justice meted out by the US penal system.

Although only 13% of the US population is black, black people account for around 44% of the prison population. Nationwide, African-Americans are about seven times more likely to end up in jail. This statistic, as criminologists will testify, is more a reflection of the disproportionate sentences given to blacks, and higher rates of prosecutions against black people, than a true measure of actual crime committed by ethnic type. No wonder many African Americans still feel that they have simply swapped plantation life for prison life.

White America, as the filmmaker Michael Moore argued most convincingly in his powerful documentary, Bowling For Columbine, lives in chronic fear of its black population, not unlike the colonial plantation owners of the 17th and 18th centuries who dreaded slave revolts. And US society is still heavily segregated along racial lines.

Earlier last week there was a fascinating documentary on Radio 4, presented by Martha Reeves (of Martha Reeves and the Vandellas fame) about the part African-Americans played in the Vietnam war. Black troops, recruited as cannon fodder, were disproportionately represented in Vietnam, where they accounted for some 29% of US troops.

When there, they were systematically picked on and disciplined if they challenged the endemic army racism. Black soldiers emerged from that war proficient in gun handling and well versed in drug abuse, then found themselves on the scrapheap. This sowed the seed for the crime and hopelessness that bedevils black ghettos to this day.

It is too easy to be smug about the superior state of race relations in the UK. No nooses, thank heavens - but segregation and discrimination prevail, according to the latest devastating analysis from the Commission For Racial Equality.

We might like to believe otherwise, but 30 years after the first Race Relations Act, black Britons are still "more likely to be stopped by the police, be excluded from school, suffer poor health treatment and live in poor housing", it says. In echoes of the US, it notes that "rumours and perceptions of injustice can trigger division and conflict which in some cases translates into violence on the streets". It concludes that "racial inequality in Britain is alive and kicking", not least in the corridors of power. The CRE hauls over the coals 15 UK government departments that have mysteriously not got around to carrying out their duties under race relations law.

In the UK, discussions of issues like gun crime are stripped of any historical context. Black men are condemned as absentee fathers and poor role models, their partners as neglectful mothers. There is no reference to the fact that these same people are the descendants of enslaved Africans brutally snatched from their communities then put to work on Caribbean plantations by British, often Scottish, plantation owners. Suggest that the prime minister should apologise for slavery and this marks you out as a bleeding-heart liberal. Slavery, we are told, was centuries ago. Black people should "get over it".

But how can they when little changes? One white friend, whose boyfriend is a black Londoner, gets a taste of British racism as part of a mixed-race couple. With some regularity, she is left spitting with rage and resentment as yet another car screeches to a halt beside them and the driver winds down the window to shout out some venomous racial abuse.

We shouldn't kid ourselves. Racism doesn't just hang out in Louisiana. Its poisonous, polluting presence blights Britain too.