COMMENT POSTED TO AN EDITORIAL IN THE OBSERVER
The royals and race:
from Victoria and Abdul to Harry and Meghan Markle
"Our society is
still obsessed with ‘purity’ and is shocked that a royal could marry a person
of colour'
I'm not sure the word "purity" covers the
situation.
Purity is not only a very loaded word, how does it possibly
account for Scots (both highland and lowland), Northern Irish, Welsh, Cornish,
English (many varieties), etc?
It doesn't.
The English people themselves are the result of Celts,
Romans, Norse, Norman French, Saxons, and other bits and pieces over centuries.
They are not homogeneous and becoming less so now with each
passing year.
"Meghan Markle
attracted comments about her race when she started dating Prince Harry."
Now, there I take serious exception.
Her race?
First, I thought thinking people gave up on that word after
the Nazis. The truth is that it never really described anything accurately.
We have groups of certain languages and ethnicities and
color and other physical characteristics, but today thinking people do not say
race.
Just as is the case of the British people being hybrids,
just so are the French or Germans or Italians. Each of these modern national
identities has a complex history, not simple and homogeneous.
America is only called a nation of migrants because all the
migration, which happened in every country, occurred at a more recent time.
And here’s another objectionable expression used here, “…a court and household that is still about
as white as it was in Victoria’s day…”
So what?
Apart from the history of the Royal Family, which is German,
why has it become somehow unworthy to be “white,” which in fact is another term
studiously to be avoided, considering all the ugly people on all sides of the
“racial divide” who use it daily as either one of contempt or one of unmerited
praise.
Ms. Markle obviously has a complex heritage. She can no more
be described as black or colored than can, say, Beyonce.
In the end, the really unacceptable fact here is the very
idea of royal marriage. It is long outdated, rather backward to say the least,
and having nothing to do with a twenty-first century state.
Harry himself is a dull and reckless man of absolutely no
particular merit. His marriage is no more important or consequential than the
marriage of the local pub keeper.
Get rid of the monarchy because it is itself a living form
of pretention and prejudice.
_______________________
Response to a reader
who claimed Britain would be dull without the monarchy:
Dull?
Could there be anything duller than Harry?
Or Anne?
Or Charles?
Or riding around in a gold-painted Walt Disney coach?
_______________________
Response to a reader
who said Isn't this why Diana was killed. Because the mother of the future king
could not be allowed to potentially have a baby, a half brother or sister of
the future king, with a brown Muslim:
No, and it is a totally silly notion, unfortunately still
widely held.
Diana died because she was a reckless, unbalanced person.
She was the one who liked rushing off in fast cars.
Just as she was the one who liked reckless love affairs,
often hurting other people's lives, as the affair with her bodyguard.
Just as she is reliably reported sometimes laughing
uncontrollably in the backseat of her limo at some of the very people she had
just smiled at and accepted flowers from.
Just as we have a record of almost insanely neurotic phone
calls to people - scores of them sometimes in a single day.
Her lovely smile and occasional kind gesture cannot hide the
pretty dark reality of her unbalanced mind.
And, please note, any similarities between her behavior and
Harry's is not coincidental.
He appears to have inherited her worst qualities.
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