Endgame, p.16
Endgame, page 16
Several weeks later, Camilla gave an impassioned defense of free speech and the right of writers to express themselves at a Clarence House event for her Queen’s Reading Room book club. Her words followed news that some offensive or outdated terms had been altered or removed in the latest British editions of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Matilda, and other books by Roald Dahl. But it was also considered, particularly by the right-wing press, a rallying cry in the face of the “woke, snowflake culture” she famously detests and has publicly derided.
Other failed opportunities include the number of ignored Black History months—every single one of them up until 2022. You may remember when Prince Edward and Sophie, then the Countess of Wessex, were bizarrely dispatched to pose with alpacas at a city farm in 2021 (the urban farm was marking the start of the annual Black History observance). And who can forget when the same couple was sent to Antigua and Barbuda, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, and Saint Lucia just one month after William and Kate’s flop Caribbean tour? It was the perfect opportunity to patch and correct the mistakes of the March 2022 trip but stopped way short of achieving this. The couple smiled, waved, and danced their way across the islands and in front of campaigners demanding apologies and reparatory justice. A disinterested Edward went on to offend Antigua prime minister Gaston Browne as he guffawed in response to the prime minister’s suggestion that the Wessexes should use their “diplomatic influence” to help provide “reparatory justice” for Caribbean countries that were colonized by Britain. “You may not necessarily comment on this issue as you represent an institution that doesn’t comment on contentious issues,” said Browne. “Our civilization should understand the atrocities that took place during colonialism and slavery, and the fact that we have to bring balance by having open discussions.” Edward’s response? “I wasn’t keeping notes, so I’m not going to give you a complete riposte. But thank you for your welcome today.” Later that day the couple’s scheduled trip to Grenada was canceled at the last minute following advice from the country’s government. The move came just hours after new reports revealed that Britain directly owned hundreds of enslaved Black people in Grenada during the eighteenth century.
Slow progress has, unsurprisingly, not been helped by the majority of the mainstream British newspapers, who—just like the institution of the monarchy—run in the opposite direction when faced with the subject of race. The majority of the country’s print media remains lenient and evasive when it comes to conversations about Britain’s history of slavery or the accusations of racism in the Palace (racism anywhere, for that matter). Spend enough time around certain journalists or outlets and you will find yourself hearing the hard-to-believe argument that the royal family has actually helped eradicate the colonial ties of the past. Using an apologist’s lens, some commentators have also claimed that over the years the Queen did more to “eradicate” racism while in pursuit of an equal society than any other monarch or politician in British history. There’s also the belief that Queen Elizabeth II’s years of traveling the length and breadth of the Commonwealth helped modernize the ties between the nations and to move past the fallout from the fall of the British Empire. “She was ahead of the curve,” said historian and professor of imperial and military history at King’s College London Ashley Jackson. “Unlike many of her ministers and indeed her British subjects, she discerned the need to avoid ‘old’ ideas of imperial loyalty or Anglo-Saxon superiority and instead to embrace new members. She emphasized the importance of common history, ideas, and values—theoretically shared by the diverse people of the Commonwealth, even if not by their leaders.”
And while, yes, the Queen did oversee a decolonization process that played out around the world, she also took her colonial role seriously, sending the following message to “peoples of the British Commonwealth Empire” while still a princess in 1947: “I declare before you all that my whole life, whether it be long or short, shall be devoted to your service and to the service of our great imperial family to which we all belong.” That imperial family was, of course, almost exclusively white—its prosperity secured by disposable Black and Brown lives.
When historian and professor David Olusoga claimed on the Sussexes’ Harry & Meghan Netflix series that the palaces are still filled with “racist imagery,” a number of royal commentators rushed to exonerate the monarchy. “Clearly they have never been [to the palaces],” one ranted. But when you look for yourself, the imagery is irrefutably noticeable. Though the royal art collection has more than 7,500 works, it was seventeenth-century Dutch landscape painter Aelbert Cuyp’s The N***o Page that hung on the wall of William and Kate’s formal drawing room at Kensington Palace when President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama visited in April 2016. The Mail’s resident art critic (yes, they have one!) praised the choice, suggesting that the image “featuring a black servant boy . . . would particularly appeal to a History of Art graduate such as Kate.” But the critic failed to point out the giant lamp and plant pot that were hastily plonked in front of the 1660 painting to obscure the brass plate featuring the painting’s offensive title. I was one of two journalists covering that private engagement, and at the time, Kensington Palace was keen for the art incident to go unreported. Having inside access to the engagements (which, unlike members of the British media–only royal rota, is not guaranteed to any members of U.S. press), I was being careful not to be cut out and regrettably agreed to exclude the incident from my otherwise positive coverage of the meeting.
Take a peek into Camilla’s Ray Mill House in Wiltshire, and you can’t miss the giant blackamoor statue in the entrance hall—a four-foot muscular Black man holding a lightbulb and lampshade high into the sky. A Palace source says it has been removed “in recent years.” It was a similar tale for blackamoor sconces hanging on the walls at Clarence House. When the Google Arts & Culture platform gave the world a look inside Charles’s London residence in 2018, eagle-eyed netizens spotted the offending items and officials quickly took them down (both the photos and from the residence).
Removing offending objects are steps in the right direction, but they don’t go nearly far enough—many more symbols of slavery, whether in art or jewelery, remain in royal households and in public view. The Royal Collection Trust published a catalog that featured more than forty uncensored uses of racist slurs, including the n-word, in its artifact descriptions. It took complaints over fifteen years before the Trust finally removed Ancient and Modern Gems and Jewels from circulation in July 2023. And, despite calls from campaigners for a redesign, one of Britain’s highest-honor medals bestowed by King Charles to ambassadors and diplomats for distinguished service still features a depiction of St. Michael, a blue-eyed white angel, standing on the neck of Satan, portrayed as a chained Black man.
More glaringly, looted wealth is visible everywhere. The Kohi-Noor diamond in the crown last worn by the Queen Mother has only belonged to the monarchical institution since 1849, the year it was stolen from Lahore, India. And the Cullinan Diamond, a showpiece three-thousand-carat artifact of British imperialism incorporated into the Crown Jewels, including the sovereign’s scepter, was taken from South Africa in 1905 and “gifted” to King Edward VII by the government of the British Transvaal Colony. Calls for the Koh-i-Noor’s return have grown following the death of Queen Elizabeth II. And Camilla’s decision to have Queen Mary’s crown reset with the Cullinan III, IV, and V diamonds for her May 2023 coronation ceremony reignited questions about the royal family’s involvement with the development of diamond resource exploitation in southern Africa. “If the Koh-i-Noor is a symbol of East India Company plunder imperialism in India, the Cullinan is a symbol of a different kind of British racialized settler colonialism in southern Africa—and the royal family and their literal crowns and regalia are one place where these two strains of imperialism come together,” said Danielle Kinsey, a professor of history and nineteenth-century Britain at Carleton University in Ontario, Canada.
Revealingly similar to the way in which the Firm avoided the Black Lives Matter movement, Queen Elizabeth II mostly stayed mum on the progress in racial matters during the banner days of the civil rights movement. When Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. requested an audience with the monarch during a visit to London and invited her to his sermon at St. Paul’s Cathedral, he received no response. When he was shot dead a little more than three years later in Memphis, though Buckingham Palace made no comment at the time, the Queen did later go on to shape the theme of her 1968 Christmas speech around brotherhood, stating, “Mankind can only find progress in friendship and cooperation.” As social psychologist and author Dr. John Petrocelli pointed out, “With a world stage and powerful voice that was inherited by her very position, it could have and should have been the Queen’s greatest contribution—she had nothing to lose and most everything to gain by being the real champion she is now ballyhooed to be.” British activist, lawyer, and author Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu added, “She was a colonial Queen—monarch of an estate which owned the biggest empire in human history. She was the head of state of the British Empire at the start of her reign. You can’t divorce the Queen from the institution that she represented and the institution she represents has one of the strongest known links to the start of, and the pain of, slavery and colonialism.”
In other words, it’s like saying Pope Francis doesn’t represent the Catholic Church.
* * *
This was the backdrop on which I based my comments in my aforementioned article that referenced white supremacy, and I stand by that piece today. The Palace aide who admonished me at the time said, “Your statements have huge consequences.” It’s why, he added, the Buckingham Palace communications team made the decision to exclude me from a media briefing about the funeral of Prince Philip shortly after that article came out (although, after kicking up a stink, the Palace did backtrack and accredit me for Windsor Castle access days later). “If you say things like that, of course you’re going to be at the bottom of the list.” So much for a free press, I gruffly replied.
I knew this environment, both present and historical, would make it almost impossible for Meghan to flourish in the royal system. And the signs were there even in the earliest coverage of her time in the royal orbit, when news outlets used loaded terms like narcissistic, social climber, exotic DNA, and straight out of Compton (despite her not growing up anywhere near it) both to describe her, and to establish a narrative. Just eight days after the Sunday Express revealed their relationship to the world on October 31, 2016, Prince Harry felt compelled to write a statement, released by his head of communications, Jason Knauf, condemning the “racial undertones” and “wave of abuse” and harassment coming from the media.
“It was something new to all of us,” Knauf told me in early 2020. “Harry led the push [against that], but there were others who didn’t agree.” Though retrospective rumors incorrectly suggested it was his brother, Prince William, who pushed back against Harry’s communication efforts, several sources have since confirmed that it was Charles who felt taking on the papers “so aggressively” was a “terrible” idea. However, this came after the fact. Prior to the statement, Harry’s father was kept completely in the dark, because his son had little faith in him to stand on the right side. “[Harry] knew Charles would try and stop him because he’s so afraid of the press and damage to his own [media] relationships. Everyone involved had to keep it secret, including William,” a senior Palace aide said. Sadly, it was not just his father who was disappointed in Harry’s actions. Key members of staff—across all three royal households—thought Harry’s “hoo-hah” (the choice phrase of the Queen’s then deputy private secretary Edward Young, apparently) was much ado about nothing. Putting his foot down about paparazzi was one thing, but calling out racism in the press? The institution just couldn’t see the benefit of publicly addressing the sensitive issue.
As tabloid op-eds and online hate increased, so did the level of denial from Palace aides, who claimed they couldn’t really see any racism in press coverage. In the upside-down dimension, some expressed sympathy for those in the press instead. A communication staffer at Kensington Palace comforted royal correspondents whom Twitter users had accused of being racist in their articles or commentary. “I do think the Duke of Sussex and his office will bear some responsibility if a journalist is harmed as a result of that ill-judged statement,” tweeted Daily Express royal editor Richard Palmer. “But, without naming names, I can say that one of [the Palace aides] is telling royal reporters to ignore the racism nuts.” Harry, who monitored Twitter closely back then, noticed the journalist’s remark. The Kensington Palace team “would much rather have the media’s back than mine,” he told a friend.
As the level of online abuse Meghan received increased during her burgeoning relationship with Harry, Kensington Palace struggled with the new reality of their household Instagram account getting swarmed with slurs and hate speech. “You know you can block specific key words from appearing in the comments, right?” I said to one junior aide at the time. The office was aware, they said, but one of its higher-ranking aides felt that at the time it would be “inappropriate” to start censoring comments left for a publicly funded institution. “They just don’t think you can start censoring people and it’s better to manually take care of anything bad.” As a result, thousands of daily comments loaded with the likes of the n-word, as well as monkey, banana, or dagger emojis, steadily appeared, many of them visible for days and weeks before they were deleted. Fans and public supporters of the couple—a movement that had quickly taken on the Sussex Squad moniker—were often the ones trawling through comments and reporting offending items.
“If you’d seen the stuff that was written and you were receiving it . . . the kind of rhetoric that’s online, if you don’t know what I know, you would feel under threat all of the time,” Neil Basu, former head of counterterrorism for London’s Metropolitan Police, said. “We had teams investigating it and people have been prosecuted for those threats.” Due to the tabloids’ ridiculous suggestions that I was essentially an extended member of the couple’s team (we’ll get to that shortly), threats like the ones aimed at the duchess came my way, too—from disturbing descriptions of violent acts and graphic images, to racial slurs and warnings of physical harm at public engagements. I regularly passed all of these on to the authorities.
In March 2019, Kensington Palace finally ramped up its social media safety efforts, after turning to Twitter and Instagram’s owner, Facebook, for help and dedicating a budget for online resources. “We ask that anyone engaging with our social media channels shows courtesy, kindness and respect for all other members of our social media communities,” a message posted on the royal.uk website read. “We reserve the right to hide or delete comments made on our channels, as well as block users who do not follow these guidelines.”
The efforts were necessary, but pretty late in the game. Meghan was just two months away from giving birth to Archie, the first multiracial child in the family. One British-based YouTube account, a channel dedicated to conspiracy theories about Meghan faking her pregnancy, among other wild tales, had even encouraged followers to try to “pop” the duchess’s “moon bump” at a future public appearance. “She’s living in fear . . . not just for herself but for the baby. You can’t expect anyone to live like that,” one of the couple’s most senior staff told me at the time. But the fact that Archie faced more security threats than other royal children did not translate to additional safety measures. Hierarchy still took precedence, and as seventh in line to the throne at the time, Archie was not considered a particularly high priority. The Cambridge family had a bigger security team—a point that Harry was very aware of. “No one is thinking about the fact that my wife is biracial, my son is mixed race . . . None of this registers to anyone,” Harry told an aide that summer.
In fact, minimal thought ever went into race-related issues when it came to the Sussexes. This is the same institution that suggested that Lady Susan Hussey (yes, that Lady Susan Hussey) help biracial Meghan acclimate to Palace life and navigate the royal system. The duchess turned down the offer, probably having already sensed that it might not be the best idea.
When Palace aides later told reporters, including myself, that they “bent over backwards” to make Meghan feel comfortable at Buckingham Palace, this included a follow-up suggestion that perhaps the Queen’s Ghanaian-born household cavalry officer Lieutenant Colonel Nana Kofi Twumasi-Ankrah should be the one to help Meghan. Though a charming and intelligent man, it stood out like a sore thumb to Meghan and her friends that, due to a lack of Black or other non-white staff, let alone women, in relevant senior roles, the Palace had to turn to someone who was the Queen’s attendant. “I doubt Kate was offered an equerry [for guidance],” a pal said to Meghan.
As for Harry and Meghan’s wedding, aides from Charles’s Clarence House office put themselves forward to help with the planning for the big day, but Harry, knowing from experience how quickly things leak, especially from his father’s camp, put the kibosh on the idea. “Far too big for her boots,” one of Charles’s staffers—a regular Daily Mail source at the time—moaned about Meghan. “Who does she think she is?”
Just who does she think she is? This was a running theme throughout Meghan’s time as a working royal. Here was a woman who, in the eyes of many within the institution (consciously or unconsciously), wasn’t considered good enough to be part of it—be it because of her class, her family, her ethnicity, or her career history. Or maybe just because she wasn’t sufficiently reverential and thankful for the opportunity, a haughty opinion that also stinks of prejudice and privilege.
