Even the Washington Post has gotten into the “royal racist” story! WaPo did a piece about the mistranslation of Omid Scobie’s Endgame and how the British media is in full meltdown. WaPo also included this: “Some of the most-searched phrases on Google in Britain on Wednesday included ‘who is the royal racist?’ and ‘which royal asked about skin color?’” This terrible racist thing has truly captured the imaginations of the British public! Speaking of, the Guardian’s Zoe Williams devoted a fascinating column to this whole ordeal. You can read the full piece here, and here are some highlights:

The “concerns about Archie’s skin color” story: This allegation, along with more atmospheric charges of racism, has always been the smoking gun of the self-exiled pair. Harry and Meghan have said many other things that they must have thought would put public opinion on their side: in the Oprah interview, they described the Firm as completely insensible to Meghan’s mental distress, unsympathetic, adamantine, concerned only about appearances. In Spare, there was a huge amount of fraternal unpleasantness that permanently lowered my own opinion of Prince William, and it wasn’t that high to begin with. Yet the media response overall was a shrugging, “ah well, sure there are two sides to every story”, which reflected not so much a disapproval of dirty laundry in public as an unspoken agreement between the royals, preserving their reputation, and the press (mainly the tabloids), permanently ranged against Harry and Meghan for their audacity in challenging various newspapers in court.

The racism charge is the most significant: The charge of racism, however, will not evaporate: it is not just the extraordinary crassness/white supremacist bouquet you can smell in that Archie remark; the couple also suggest, in their Netflix documentary, that the royal family turned a deliberate blind eye to the press as it criticised Meghan in racialised terms that ran the gamut from coded to bleedin’ obvious. This then triggered an onslaught of open racism and white supremacy on social media, contributing to Meghan’s distress, which the royals disdained to notice.

Denials don’t work: The problem for the royals is that blanket denials don’t work. Prince William can say, “We are very much not a racist family” (as he did, after the Oprah interview), but this asks us to conceive of them all as one homogeneous unit, exactly as unracist as one another, exactly as intolerant of micro and macro aggressions from their entourage, exactly as evolved. This assertion does the Windsors more harm than good, when there are palace officials telling Scobie off the record that “there’s still more work to be done”: more work from every leg of this giant centipede? Or are some of them, in fact, further along than others?

The intellectual shape of the Windsors: Besides which, so many members of this family are simply not in the intellectual shape they would need to be to do the delicate work of representing the royals abroad – it’s not their one job, but it’s up there. Inevitably, touring the Commonwealth, they’ll be met with challenge, both historical, for their ancestral part in colonialism and slavery, and current, for their stance on reparations: it’s going to take tact, humility, curiosity, open-mindedness and courage, before you even get to the crunchier business of money. Prince Edward would have to be fighting fit to display even half those things at once. Instead, when the prime minister of Antigua and Barbuda, Gaston Browne, mentioned “reparatory justice”, Edward guffawed (this is Scobie’s testimony – “guffawed”, granted, is quite a loaded word, but even “laughed” would have been woeful, if true).

The crisis has been obvious for years: Endgame is quite granular on the tensions and impossible contradictions this is causing within the family (even the ones who still talk to each other); the palace was reportedly very upset when William moved immediately to distance himself from the former lady-in-waiting Susan Hussey, after she asked Ngozi Fulani where she was “really” from. (The prince’s previous assertion had come back to bite him: either Lady Hussey didn’t speak for the family and its courtiers, or they were all engaged round-the-clock wondering where people of colour were really from.) Scobie speculates “schadenfreude” from Charles, when pictures of William and Kate’s tour of the Caribbean – the couple dressed in white, in an open-top Land Rover, looking like Mr and Mrs Coloniser about to address the mine shaft – landed badly. But these hints of a brewing crisis, whether speculative or evidenced, are supplementary: the crisis is obvious, and has been since Megxit (if we’re really calling it that). It’s much larger than a family estrangement, and remaining estranged – or making up, for that matter – won’t fix it.

[From The Guardian]

I genuinely wonder about this: “In Spare, there was a huge amount of fraternal unpleasantness that permanently lowered my own opinion of Prince William, and it wasn’t that high to begin with.” I sometimes feel like William really did escape the larger conversations around his profoundly unpleasant, violent, racist and rude behavior, especially within the British media community. It’s interesting that there’s a columnist who at least admits that yeah, her opinion of William was significantly lowered. Williams is right about all of the rest of it, the “crisis is obvious” and it has been for years. Oh well, sucks to be them.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Instar.