SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
meghan markle
Like the Diana Story, Meghan's Fight With the Royals Will Ensure Nothing Really Changes
The Royal Family, the perpetuation of privilege and the erosion of democracy will march on as before, in the same long and glorious British tradition.
Mar 09, 2021
Oprah Winfrey's interview with Meghan and Harry is a perfect case study of how an important political debate about the corrupting role of the monarchy on British life gets shunted aside yet again, not just by the endless Royal soap opera but by supposedly progressive identity politics.
As so often, a focus on identity risks not only blunting our capacity for critical thinking but can be all too readily weaponised: in this case, as the media's main take-away from the Oprah interview illustrates, by providing an implicit defence of class privilege.
The racism directed at Markle--sorry, the Duchess of Sussex--and baby Archie is ugly, it goes without saying (but maybe more to the point, must be stated to avoid being accused of ignoring or trivialising racism).
The concern expressed by a senior royal during Markle's pregnancy about Archie's likely darker skin colour does indeed reveal how deeply ingrained racism is in the British establishment and how much it trickles down to the rest of British society, not least through the billionaire-owned media.
Princely 'birthright'
But more significant is how the racism demonstrated towards Markle and Archie has played out in the media coverage of the interview and the resulting "national conversation" on social media--nowadays, the only real barometer we have for judging such conversations.
The problem is that, via Oprah, the Sussexes get to frame the significance of the House of Windsor's racism: both in the threat that, when Charles ascends to the throne, grandson Archie will be deprived of his princely "birthright" because he is of mixed race; and in the fact that Harry and Meghan have been hounded from Palace life into celebrity-style exile in the US.
In the process, an important, democratic conversation has yet again been supplanted about why Britain still maintains and reveres these expensive relics of a medieval system of unaccountable rule based on a superior (if no longer divine) blood line.
Instead, the conversation initiated by Oprah is a much more politically muddled one about whether it is right that a "commoner" woman of colour and her mixed-race son are obstructed from fully participating in this medieval system of privilege.
Image makeover
A real political debate about privilege--one that demands greater equality and an end to racist presumptions about blood lines--has been obscured and trivialised once again by a row of the kind preferred by the corporate media: whether most of the Royal Family are too racist to realise that a woman of colour like Meghan could help them with a twenty-first-century image makeover.
As a result, we are presented with a false binary choice. Either we cheer on the Royal Family and implicitly condone their racism; or we cheer on Meghan and implicitly support her battle to better veil the feudal ugliness of the British monarchy.
It ought to be possible to want Archie to live a life equal to "white" babies in the UK without also wanting him to live a life of pomp and circumstance, designed to ensure that other babies--white, black and brown--grow up to be denied the privileges he enjoys by virtue of royal birth.
\u201cThis is your reminder that Versailles gets double the number of visitors compared to Buckingham Palace.\n\nThe way for the country to really get an economic boost from the royal family is therefore to chop all their heads off.\u201d— Craig Murray - (@Craig Murray -) 1615242460
Divisive and enervating
What the Oprah interview does--is designed to do--is derail the intersection of class and race in politically damaging ways.
A meaningful democratic struggle prioritises class unity as the battering ram against establishment power that long ago learnt to protect itself by dividing us through our competing identities. Class struggle does not ignore race; it embraces it and all other socially constructed identities used by power to rationalise oppression. Class subsumes them into a collective struggle strengthened by numbers.
Struggle based on identity, by contrast, is inherently divisive and politically enervating, as the Meghan Markle case illuminates. Her challenge to Royal "tradition" alienates those most invested in ideas of monarchy, "Britishness" or white identity. And it does so while offering no more than a sop to those invested in breaking glass ceilings, even of the kind that aren't worth smashing in the first place.
Meghan's fight for the first mixed-race British prince is no more politically progressive than the celebration by the media two years ago of the news that for the first time women were in charge of the military-industrial complex--the one that rains down death and destruction on "Third World" men, women and children.
Value for money
Strange as it is to recall now--in an age of social media, when anyone can comment on anything, and the "mainstream" media's billionaire gatekeepers have supposedly been sidelined--ordinary Britons discussed abolishing the monarchy far more in the 1970s, when I was a child, than they do nowadays.
Getting rid of the Royal Family--like getting rid of nuclear weapons, another topic no one talks about seriously any more--was mainstream enough then that Royalists were often forced on to the defensive. As the mood soured among a vocal section of the population, the Queen's defenders were forced hurriedly to switch from arguments rooted in deference and tradition to more utilitarian claims that the Royals offered "value for money", supposedly boosting commerce and tourism.
Prince Charles' engagement in 1981 to a beautiful, demure teenage "English rose", Princess Diana, looked to many, even at the time, suspiciously like a move to reinvigorate a tired, increasingly unpopular brand.
The media spectacle of a fairytale romance and wedding, followed by years of controversy, disillusionment and betrayal, culminating in divorce and finally Diana's death / murder, very effectively distracted the British public for the next 16 years from the question of what purpose a Royal Family served. It became only too clear what role they played: they kept us engrossed in a real-life, better-than-TV drama.
Champions of identity
Diana's supposed struggle to grow from adolescence to womanhood in the glare of media intrusion and under the strictures of "The Firm" created the prototype for a new type of apolitical, Mills and Boon-style identity politics.
Following Diana's escapades--from the secular saint who cleared landmines to the raunchy princess who had illicit sex with her riding instructor, an army major no less--was far more thrilling than the campaign to end the monarchy and the regressive landed class it still represents.
Diana's life story helped pave the way to the reinvention of the left through the 1990s--under Tony Blair in the UK and Bill Clinton in the US--as champions of a new social issues-obsessed non-politics.
Both were ushered into power after reassuring the newly triumphant corporate elite that they would harness and divert popular energy away from dangerous struggles for political change towards safe struggles for superficial social change.
In the UK, that was achieved most obviously in Blair's assiduous courtship of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Importantly, Blair persuaded Murdoch that, as prime minister, he would not only preserve the economic legacy of the Thatcher years but head further down the path of deregulation.
Murdoch--himself no fan of a British monarchy that had always looked down on him as a vulgar Australian--also understood that the inevitable soap opera quality of exceptional individuals battling the UK's rigid hierarchy of privilege, spurred on by Blair's New Labour, would prove great for sales of his newspapers. Just as Oprah knows that the only tangible consequence of the Harry and Meghan interview is that it will rake in many more millions for her own media empire.
Sticking It to the Man
In the new era of identity-saturated non-politics, demands for equality mean removing obstacles so that more women, people of colour and the LGBT community can participate in institutions that represent power and privilege.
These battles are not about overthrowing those systems of privilege, as earlier identity-based struggles such as the Black Panthers' were. Success serves simply to placate identity-focused groups by helping those of most "merit" elbow their way into the preserves of established power.
Those achievements started with the most visible, least significant areas of the economy, such as sport and celebrity, and led over time to greater access to the professions.
The current excitement among some on the left at Meghan's "Sticking It to the Man" appears to derive from the disruptive threat she poses to the House of Windsor--not to its economic, social and political power, but to its status as the last hold-out against Blair's identity-fuelled "revolution".
Narrative twist
Diana's emancipation story helped distract us for nearly two decades from confronting central questions about the nature and role of the British establishment in preserving and veiling power.
Now Meghan Markle is expanding the identity story in a new direction, one that once again embraces the story of a young, "headstrong" woman scorned by the Royal Family for snubbing tradition. But this time there is an alluring contemporary twist to the narrative: the Family's resistance to diversity and its refusal to own its racist past.
Unlike Diana who stood alone and seemingly fragile, Meghan and Harry offer a more relevant, modern picture of a confident, professional young couple standing and fighting together for what is fair, for what should be theirs by right.
This feels important, bold and empowering. But it is the precise opposite. It is more Mills and Boons, but this time with diversity thrown in to generate more appeal on one side and more hostility on the other.
Meghan's story will continue to work its magic: fascinating, infuriating and pacifying us in equal measure as we focus on what is private, unknowable and can be endlessly contested rather than what is universal, visible and impossible to refute.
Meanwhile, the Royal Family, the perpetuation of privilege and the erosion of democracy will march on as before, in the same long and glorious British tradition.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Racism Among the Royals? Really?
While Queen Elizabeth the person may be off the hook for asking about Archie's complexion, the monarchy's not off the hook for colonialism or white supremacy.
Mar 09, 2021
Shock, horror! There is racism among the royals. I know sarcasm is the laziest form of humor, but is there something about a hereditary white monarchy that we don't yet understand?
In what's being called a "hand grenade" interview with Oprah Winfrey on Sunday, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex let rip about the misery they'd endured as the royal family's first mixed-race couple and alleged that someone--not Queen Elizabeth or her husband--even questioned the likely skin tone of their yet-to-be born baby.
In the context of the Divine Right of Kings, the "who-said-what-to-Harry and Meghan" question is most certainly missing the white supremacist forest for the trees.
Now the who-said-what-to-whom racism chase has started. This was always going to be a clickbait cash cow for commercial media, and so it has been. Even as much of the world tried to mark International Women's Day, March 8th, the media closed in on one woman, Queen Elizabeth, and her entourage.
A palace under pressure and a game of high-profile "gotcha" is good for clickbait and ratings, but it doesn't help us understand racism.
In the context of the Divine Right of Kings, the "who-said-what-to-Harry and Meghan" question is most certainly missing the white supremacist forest for the trees.
In fact, the whole Meghan vs the Monarchy episode is only worth talking about because of the way it illustrates just what we as a society have been doing wrong when it comes to talking about racism.
Understood as a personal attitude problem, the utterly unscientific assertion that human beings are different on account of their skin tone is a nasty phenomenon that we uproot by upbraiding individuals. There's no excuse for racist words or acts in our multicultural society, we mostly agree.
But looking at racism as a personal problem, we miss the bigger picture, which in this case is a twelve-hundred year-old system by which a single family holds unaccountable power over the United Kingdom's parliament, its military and its church. That includes Scotland, Wales and a hunk of Ireland. The Queen is also titular head of 14 other countries, including many Caribbean and Pacific islands.
When the British Empire was at its height, the Crown ruled lucratively over 412 million people across one quarter of the globe. There's nothing democratic, secular or multi-cultural about that.
So, while Queen Elizabeth the person may be off the hook for asking about Archie's complexion, the monarchy's not off the hook for colonialism or white supremacy.
And while we're talking about systems, for International Women's Day, UNICEF reported that ten million additional child marriages of girls of color may occur before the end of the decade, threatening years of progress. Did you see that headline anywhere?
Keep ReadingShow Less
The Royal Wedding and the End of Whiteness?
"Whiteness itself as a term of racial and class privilege and exclusion has been constructed and has a storied history. Its meaning has changed radically over time."
May 20, 2018
Props to CNN's D.J. Judd, who pointed out a historical irony:
\u201cThe last Duke of Sussex, named in 1801, advocated for abolishing the slave trade and for religious minorities.\n\nToday, Meghan Markle, a biracial American actress and philanthropist descended from slaves, became the Duchess of Sussex. I think that\u2019s cool.\nhttps://t.co/doKzQtWZ8m\u201d— DJ Judd (@DJ Judd) 1526755997
But on reflection, some of our sense of irony on this issue is misplaced, because observers assume that British aristocracy is a bastion of "whiteness." (This remark is not aimed at Mr. Judd, who is obviously sophisticated about these issues).
I'm just saying that whiteness itself as a term of racial and class privilege and exclusion has been constructed and has a storied history. Its meaning has changed radically over time.
I pointed out in response to a silly Ann Coulter tweet:
Benjamin Franklin was extremely worried about whites being overwhelmed. He said in "Observations Concerning the Increase of Mankind, Peopling of Countries, etc." (1751):
Which leads me to add one Remark: That the Number of purely white People in the World is proportionably very small. All Africa is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny. America (exclusive of the new Comers) wholly so. And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also, the Saxons only excepted, who with the English, make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth. I could wish their Numbers were increased.
So get this. Some of the eighteenth century founding fathers only thought English and Danish people were white. Even Swedes and Germans were "swarthy." French certainly were. So Franklin would not have considered me white, since my family is French and German. We're swarthy. We do have some Scottish, but if the Swedish are swarthy I suspect he thought the Scottish were, too. Since Coulter is in part Irish and German, Ben Franklin wouldn't have accepted her as white, either, and was worried about the German part of her family acting like barbarians and interfering in elections. You can only imagine what he would have thought of German grifters like Donald Trump's grandfather.
That identification of Englishness with whiteness in the American racial imaginary is nowhere more evident than racialist imaginings of the British royal family. Though note that they substantially German, of the House of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha, so Ben Franklin would have looked down on them. And there was a long tradition in medieval Britain of yeomen looking down on the royal family, whom they saw as Norman invaders, complaining about the Norman Yoke, a trope that fed into the American Revolution, as historian Christopher Hill argued.
Of course, any notion of racial purity is a myth. The gene pool gets all mixed up over time. Some 5-10% of self-identified "whites" in the American deep south have recent African ancestors, and over time all "whites" will.
Even further back, Europe was mostly empty of people during the last Ice Age, which only ended some 12,000 years ago, and was repopulated in part from Africa and Syria. Genetic history finds bronze age Spanish and Britons to have been black, and they were the ancestors of contemporary Europeans. (Northern lattitudes select for fair skin over thousands of years because embryos in the mother's womb need enough UV rays to make vitamin D, and it is hard for those rays to get through dark skin). All this is not to mention that European royal houses have extensively intermarried and are therefore international.
I once observed,
But "whiteness" is an illusion. Because the crowned heads of Europe intermarried over centuries and because Spanish nobility was in the mix, and because in turn Spaniards and other southwestern Europeans are up to 20% North African in heritage as well as having substantial genetic endowments from Jews and various other Muslim peoples, not to mention Phoenicians and sub-saharan Africans- actually all European royal families have been mixed-race for a very long time. In fact, some genealogists allege that Prince Harry is descended from the Prophet Muhammad... the residual category of "white". . . was used [in the early 20th century) by working class Catholics in a desperate bid to distinguish themselves from Latinos and African-Americans. But really. Why are Italian-Americans from Sicily "white" in America, but people from Latin America whose ancestors lived in Catalonia are "brown"? In the medieval era, for a while, both Catalonia and Sicily were in the same country, ruled by the crown of Aragon!
The popular press in America is confused about such issues because many writers do not realize that there is no such thing as race in the 19th century biological sense. You have 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 16 great-grandparents, and by the time you get back to 1400 you have a million ancestors. For someone who hails from Europe, how likely is it that none of them were Arabs and Berbers from southern Spain who had been forced to convert and then married Catholics? Europe's population in 1400 was only 78 million or so and [each modern is] descended from a million of them. And Arabs in southern Spain were in turn intermarried with Berbers and Africans. After 50 generations (a generation is 24 years), most of the world's genes get shared around. Everyone in the Mediterranean basin shares common ancestors from only a few thousand years ago, including Tunisians and Egyptians and Spanish and Italians. The claim about Prince Harry and Muhammad is a little bit of a trick, since most contemporary Europeans are probably descended from Muhammad.
Whiteness is not solely a Western phenomenon, but where it occurs elsewhere it always also has a history and social context. In India conquerors tended to bring heavy horse cavalry through passes in the Hindu Kush mountain ranges that form a border with Afghanistan. Horses did not flourish in tropical India and therefore the invaders had an advantage. Whether Huns, or later Muslim Turks and Iranians, the invaders formed a privileged elite and their fair skin therefore was often prized. In subsaharan African kingdoms, in contrast, blackness was celebrated. But "whiteness" was never about skin color. Most northern Europeans are sort of pink, and our primary exemplar of white privilege today, the US president, is orange. Whiteness is about a conception of race based on the imaginary characteristics thought to go along with an idealized complexion.
What I fondly hope is that the whole American conception of whiteness in the 20th century, with its attempt permanently to divide the working class and artificially to denigrate people of African and Hispanic antecedents while artificially elevating Irish-Americans and Italian-Americans (not to mention German-Americans and English-Americans) as part of a supposedly superior "race," is falling apart among the millennials. It won't happen over night, but we might be seeing the beginning of its end. And that Harry and Meghan are playing an important symbolic role in furthering that process.
We're human beings, not races, and the genetic differences among human beings are too few and too inconstant to account virtually for anything at all.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Most Popular