Like my son, I was born with a full mop of red hair. In babies, the shade can be closer to peach than carrot, otherworldly in full sunlight. "Wasted on a boy," the old ladies would say over my son's pram. People do gather around red-haired infants as if drawn to a literal flame.

Perhaps that's when it starts, that sense that red hair marks one out for special treatment.

Jacky Colliss Harvey the author of Red, describes her own "proper copper" hair as "the single most significant characteristic" of her life. Harvey is English and her sensitivity to the prejudice experienced by redheads is sharpened by life in a nation where the abuse is linked more closely to ancient ethnic tensions than anywhere else, shades of "no dogs or Irish" signs in rooming houses or the mutual antipathy of the English and Scots.

But even allowing for that, her book is weakest towards the end as she makes an emotional stand against discrimination. Are the taunts of "Fanta pants" hurled by unimaginative schoolyard bullies really, as she contends, "one of the last great social prejudices"?

"People still express biases against red hair in language and in attitudes of unthinking mistrust that they would no longer dream of espousing or of exposing if the subject were skin colour, or religion, or sexual orientation," Harvey writes.

Just possibly, African Americans in Ferguson, Muslims in Bendigo and gay families in, oh, New South Wales, might suggest they've got it worse than a ginger unfairly assumed to have a fiery temper.

Whatever misfortunes redheads experience via their hair colour, it's not racism. We are  highly visible in film, television, business and politics. We're not barred from marriage or higher office, we're not condemned by religions or politicians. I doubt  we're overrepresented in jails or shelters.

But even if you don't identify as "the white-skinned other", this wide-ranging history of our tribe is enjoyable when not irritating.

Harvey is terrific on the science, unpicking the complicated DNA jackpot of recessive genes and chromosomal switches that trigger the full spectrum of redness from strawberry tints and auburn flecks to full manes of flaming copper.

Redheads do prove to be different in some scientifically plausible ways. It's true we're more sensitive to pain, and need more anaesthesia - which would go some way to explaining my  history of dental misery. Perfume really does smell different on our skin. While paler skinned variants have always been aware of our vulnerability to skin cancers, it was alarming to read of potential links to Parkinson's disease as well.

Our origins are traced way back to the grasslands of Central Asia, where redheaded tribes  of Thracians​ and Scythians​ bestowed upon us that quarrelsome reputation. While a remnant, the Udmurts,  still live along the Volga, Harvey traces ginger migration west, north and even far, far to the east, to red-haired mummies  discovered in western China.

She also tracks our cultural history, from medieval paintings of Mary Magdalene, turned red as shorthand for her whorish past, to the spectacular works of ginger fetishist Dante Gabriel Rossetti. Russian emigre Max Factor, providing hair and make-up to Hollywood, helped launch the artificial redheads of technicolour, including Rita Hayworth and Lucille Ball  (originally brunettes).

The book strikes a note of pity for red-haired men, rarely considered as attractive as the women - although it never held back Spencer Tracy, Robert Redford or Michael Fassbender.

Harvey catalogues how the redhead's exoticism has long been conflated with stereotypes of "the other": the stupid ginger slave in ancient Greece, the Jewish moneylender in medieval screeds, the brawling Mick of 19th-century caricature, the gormless sidekick of TV  shorthand. Dickens gets a slapping for creating Uriah Heep, the obsequious redhead of David Copperfield.

Reading this dossier, I see why my people may have earned a reputation for their temper. It seems so unfair!

So yes, there's a case that redheads have been and remain targets of lazy stereotyping by schoolyard bullies or moronic advertising creatives (looking at you, VicRoads). But Harvey's whistlestop tour of our contribution to the cultural imagination reveals far more positives than negatives, from Joan in Mad Men to those wonderful wild girls of children's books, Anne Shirley and  Pippi Longstocking.

The Australian experience is mostly missing, save a passing reference to Tim Minchin's song Prejudice ("only a ginger can call another ginger ginger"). It's a shame because our sunburnt citizens have given us some wonderful words for the tribe: bluey, bloodnut and most recently, ranga.

I first heard it at my son's 18th, back in 2007: "three cheers for the ranga", someone yelled, and I was delighted to discover it was short for orang-utan. They're beautiful creatures, and I was thrilled to have a genuine Australian neologism inspired by them.

In truth, I have no more reason to be proud of the genetic mutation that led   to red hair than the DNA codes that determined my height. But I blame that early conditioning in the pram under a tuft of pink hair. Even though I now have to enhance the original colour with help from the hairdresser, I'll always feel a little ranga pride.