What do Harry and Meghan’s elite woes tell us about racism in Britain? Virtually nothing | Nesrine Malik

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You probably won’t remember, given all that followed, but when Harry and Meghan got married there was a popular view in the media that their union was a watershed moment for British race relations. The wedding, we were told, cast a spell over black, white and mixed-race people, who were enchanted by the nods to Meghan’s African-American cultural heritage during the ceremony. A new era is dawning, reads a headline in the New York Times. Modern was a word often used to describe the pair. A modern wedding, for a modern couple, in modern Brittany.

This new era has not begun. But the prophecies of this one are useful to review, because they should remind us that it didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. Because the country Harry and Meghan got married in was the one that, just months before their wedding, said Paulette Wilson, who had lived in Britain for 50 years, was removable in Jamaica and detained at Yarls Wood . The Windrush scandal was also modern Britain.

The struggles for diversity and inclusion of the rich and famous say little about the country as a whole outside of the lives of those rich and famous. But even though they are tiny in number, their influence is gigantic. Their ability to amplify their grievances means we trace this country’s racial history through the journeys of its less relevant protagonists, such as princes and Hollywood actors. These characters inhabit such a different universe that even their publicists aren’t motivated enough to tell them that complaining in a Netflix documentary that the ceilings in their temporary palace cottage were too low isn’t something they should attempt. to ask for sympathy.

For most people, there was as little at stake in their union as there was in their departure from the royal family. Harry and Meghan have not entered any promised land, and their departure does not add them to a rebel army. The couples’ core accusation that status based on lineage superiority has not been equally distributed to them cannot be credibly extended to encompass broader, truly political, anti-racism or anti-nothingness.

If there’s one thing that stands out from their recent documentary, it’s that they’re not giving up their unearned right to kingship, but are angry that they can’t claim it. Asking for tolerance is one thing, but asking for tolerance of feudalism built on the institutionalization of inequality, tax breaks and legal exemptions for sovereign billionaires? As for the royal family, it does not want a coup d’etat: it wants its share.

They will be seen as informal ambassadors of race relations anyway. Harry and Meghan, in good times and bad, are weighed down by these expectations because in Britain we like to talk about racism when the stakes are low and the profile of the protagonists is high. People like Meghan, and sometimes black footballers and entertainers, have the privilege of being our conversation starters, sparking a discourse where we rinse and repeat arguments about whether Britain is racist or not.

The problem with that is that it traps and stifles any meaningful conversation because we end up talking about racism as how people are treated, not the danger that racism leaves people. These two forms of bias are both legitimate, but one is about the easily debated and trivialized disadvantages of being in white space, and the other is about the right to survive anywhere. One is to make assumptions about where you come from; the other is to send you back there.

Regularly visited police disguises on black men; black toddlers dying in moldy apartments; illness, death and sexual assault in the illegally overcrowded asylum processing system: None of these issues are reflected in the grievances of those whose primary experience of racism is how white institutions of the British elite are uncomfortable.

The experience of Harry and Meghan, or a number of similar figures in public life, is limited. More importantly, it cannot flow downstream. It can never be the Home Office, the black unemployment rate, or the black prison population. Their rebukes to the press focus solely on their treatment as royals, never going the very short distance to understand that celebrities are just part of a business model for some newspapers including bread and butter are the constant hammering and misinformation about migrants. , Muslims and other minorities.

That we can treat Harry and Meghan’s experience as something that other minorities can reap dividends from shows how far we are from any serious discussion of race in Britain, how we are constantly headed towards reduction from racism to skirmishes expressed in the language of hurt feelings and symbolic gestures. A country’s minorities are demanding better policing, housing and health care, but instead face a debate over which princess made the other cry over a wedding dress. bridesmaid and whether footballers should kneel before a match.

Inadvertently complicit in this, a cohort of ethnic minority Britons see themselves in Meghan a bit: in her loneliness as an outsider and the disgusting treatment she receives from authoritative boors such as Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson, who said last week he’d like to see her parade naked and pelted with feces. Some people can relate to his pain and shock that his race really matters after all despite his accomplishments and application, and in his frustration that no matter how hard you try, you’re constantly being told you don’t belong, in a subtle way , sneaky and often humiliating. manners. Believe me, I understand. But these experiences, painful and scarring as they are, are reserved for a particular class and can never constitute the sum total of claims for equality. Everyone’s experiences matter, of course, no matter how privileged they are; but societies unwilling to confront racism, which require heavy investment in reforming institutions and processes that fail people of color, motivate ethnic minorities to stay out of politics and focus on the personal.

The documentary’s unfortunate moment coming as it does during what is effectively a national strike, a cost of living crisis and a winter that has begun to bite should alert us to the fact that, as when they married , Harry and Meghan are not a reflection of the country’s successes or a resolution to its crises. They have clearly been through real inconvenience and what appear to be genuinely traumatic experiences with extremely powerful parties in the royal family and the media. I believe them. I hope, as much as I can for two people I don’t know, that they make peace with what happened to them, and that they do it on their own terms. Let them be, will you?

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