WHAT extraordinary scenes this week.

People taking to the internet to show themselves burning their Nike trainers. We've had the ice bucket challenge, we've had the No Make Up Selfie, we've had Movember.

What possible good cause could folk be supporting with the setting fire to of sporting goods? Um. It's less support and more condemnation.

The NFL player Colin Kaepernick was the first American football player to take a knee during the American national anthem in protest of police brutality against black people.

“I am not going to stand up to show pride in a flag for a country that oppresses black people and people of colour,” he said. "There are bodies in the street and [police officers] getting paid leave and getting away with murder.”

Mr Kaepernick has now been boycotted by the NFL, he is not signed to a team, yet Nike, to mark 30 years of its famous Just Do It slogan, is using the sportsman as the face of its campaign.

Certain swathes of America are furious. To an outside eye, it seems baffling that people would burn sportswear in protest at someone who is against racist police brutality.

But then, it never fails to amaze how comfortable people are showing their bigotry and ignorance. It's almost as though they don't fully understand the meaning behind their actions or the impact of their beliefs.

I saw the new Spike Lee film this week, BlacKkKlansman, in which a main character complains of police brutality against black people. The film is set in the early 1970s and asks the question of how far we've moved on.

How far we've moved on is something I'm always prompted to think about when the issue of Golliwog dolls raises its head.

Every so often a shop is discovered to be selling these items and makes the news for being criticised for doing so.

Yet a YouGov poll in June this year found that 63 per cent of people surveyed said it is not racist to sell or display a golliwog doll. Just 20 per cent said that it is while 17 per cent responded "don't know".

The question is a bit misleading - it doesn't ask whether the dolls are racist but it does ask whether selling the dolls is racist.

You think we'd get to a point where there was a general consensus on what is and isn't acceptable and just put the argument to bed.

Instead, we have a situation where people become offended at the notion a quite obviously racist item is racist.

Golliwog dolls are a stereotype of black people harking back to the era of black and white minstrels. They have thick lips, frizzy hair and paws for their hands and feet.

It doesn't really matter that they weren't considered racist when they first appeared in 1873, it doesn't matter if you had a Golliwog as a child, it doesn't matter whether you saved up for Robinson's jam tokens to earn Golliwog badges.

Times change. What is acceptable changes. It's not all political correctness gone mad - some things are simply no longer acceptable and should be left in the past.

Again on social media, a comment has been doing the rounds on Twitter taken from a post on the website Reddit.

It's written by a bride who is complaining that one of her bridesmaids has pulled out of the wedding because it is to be held on a plantation.

The bride had previously told her friend, who is black, that she would like to have a plantation wedding and the now ex-bridesmaid had explained that she would not be able to attend such an event. The bride just assumed the woman would change her mind.

Plantations were built by slaves and worked by slaves, they have an appalling history. The bridesmaid felt she would be colluding in glossing over this awful past by going along with the wedding.

She offered to pay for her dress and asked to still be included in the hen party and bridal shower.

The bride was having none of it. She asked the users of Reddit, "How do I convince her that she's being ridiculous and that what happened there was a long time ago and has no bearing on my wedding?"

Nostalgia for the past, in the case of golliwogs. A desire to obfuscate an inconvenient past in the case of plantation weddings.

We can only leave the past behind once we've guaranteed an equal future for all communities and, as Mr Kaepernick shows, we're nowhere near there yet.