Two days after the wedding of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry — now the Duke and Duchess of Sussex — The Spectator , a right-wing magazine, ran a blog entitled “The myth of ‘racist’ Britain”. Written by Douglas Murray, a far-right journalist known for his Islamophobic views, it used what it described as the “warmth and admiration” with which Ms. Markle had been “received into the heart of the British public” to insist that Britain was “significantly more tolerant, welcoming, and accepting of immigrants, and their descendants than any other country anyone can think of”.
The issue of race has become an increasingly sensitive issue in Britain. A government audit on race last year pointed to glaring differences when it came to access to public services, experiences at the hands of police, the prison system and pay. Supporters of Brexit have long shrugged off suggestions that racism was a key factor in the outcome of the 2016 referendum. A warning from the UN’s special rapporteur on racism, Tendayi Achiume, that a “Brexit-related trend” threatened racial equality and had led to growing acceptance of “racial, ethnic and religious intolerance” provoked a furious outcry from the right-wing media.
“A deep-seated belief in whiteness, in the racial, intellectual and cultural superiority of white Britain, a sense that there is some inherent conflict between white British values and accomplishments and those of everyone else, remains in so many forms,” wrote mixed-race journalist Afua Hirsch in Brit(ish): On Race, Identity and Belonging , published earlier this year.
From the early days of the relationship between Prince Harry and Ms. Markle, the issue of race inevitably appeared. In The Daily Mail, in 2016, journalist Rachel Johnson (sister of Britain’s Foreign Minister Boris Johnson) pointed to her “rich and exotic” DNA and her “dreadlocked African-American” mother from the “wrong side of the tracks”. The Spectator criticised the couple’s engagement, describing her as the kind of person a Prince would have had for a “mistress, not a wife”.
Greater diversity
During the wedding, once again, the race issue resurfaced, as commentators across the political spectrum lauded the greater diversity injected into the service — not least the quoting of Martin Luther King and references to slavery made by the Most Rev. Michael Bruce Curry, the first Black bishop of the American Episcopal Church, and the role played by the Gospel Choir or the performance of young cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason. Ms. Hirsch, the author, praised the fact that “talented Black people were more than adornment” at the ceremony and welcomed the “rousing celebration of blackness”, in a Guardian piece.
“A lot of people have expressed happiness about seeing Black representation at the wedding and this is very understandable,” says Priyamvada Gopal, a lecturer at Cambridge University. “However, we need to think of it rather differently: rather than lauding inclusion, what is striking is how horrifying the extent of past exclusion is.”
She argues that the event provided an opportunity for the right to indulge in euphemistic racism while at the same time arguing it showed the lack of racism in Britain. This week, David Lammy, a Black MP, was forced to file a police complaint over racist hate mail he received. Says Ms. Gopal: “There is the euphemising of racism [by the right-wing press] while doing exactly what the monarchy want them to do, which is pretend that Britain was never racist.”
Vidya Ram works for The Hindu and is based in London
