After decades of uneasy silence, the past year or so has thrown up a series of unconnected episodes that feed into an ongoing debate about racism and the colonial legacy: speaking from a former slaving station (in Senegal), the Portuguese president, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa, felt it was relevant to point to the abolition of slavery under the Marquis of Pombal; a group of skinheads kept watch over a statue of Padre António Vieira, seen by many as a proponent of “selective slavery”; the Public Prosecution Service accused a number of police officers of racist abuse and violence against young people in Cova da Moura; the controversy over what to call the “Discoveries Museum” showed that the evolution over time of a single word is enough to paint a psychoanalytical portrait of a people. The USA has also seen a resurgence in the latent racial tensions that Obama preferred to let lie: the country now has a racist president in the White House and identity politics are on the up. Although I run the risk of being called untrue to my roots, or worse, these seemingly disparate events have prompted me to look again at the controversy concerning the intelligence of different ethnic groups. Why? Because this is the last vexata quaestio.