Endgame, p.18
Endgame, page 18
It’s revealing that the one family member who has emerged as the most informed and honest about the Firm’s racial issues—and his own—is the one who left the institution altogether. Prince Harry’s racial awakening has its own story arc, but it’s worth remembering that he is the first royal in history to sincerely acknowledge their white privilege, their ancestral role in racial injustices, and, most importantly, their continuing bias and racism, unconscious or not. It was a journey that started the day he met Meghan but one that took on significance and meaning after he left the confines of the palace.
He also called out his own family for not taking on the racist attacks hurled at their own, even linking this institutionalized reticence to Britain’s long history of imperialism. “For us, for this union and the specifics around [Meghan’s] race, there was an opportunity—many opportunities—for my family to show some public support,” he has said.
Support did come from less expected areas. In October 2019, a Labour party political candidate, Holly Lynch, drafted an open letter regarding the racial attacks on Meghan that was later signed by seventy-two female politicians. With no illusions, it resolutely stated: “Stories and headlines have represented an invasion of your privacy and have sought to cast aspersions about your character, without any good reason as far as we can see . . . We are calling out what can only be described as outdated, colonial undertones to some of these stories.” After hearing news of the letter, Harry told a friend, “It’s more than my family ever did . . . The silence disappointed me.”
The Firm has yet to fully learn how to become more initiative-taking when faced with race-related allegations, particularly after Harry and Meghan left Oprah Winfrey speechless over certain family members’ “concerns and conversations” about Archie’s skin color. The issue may have later been briefly discussed between Meghan and Charles over letter (and this is why the incidents were not repeated in the Sussexes’ 2022 Netflix series or in Spare), but the Palace’s initial response was not a swift one—they would instead wait until the interview’s U.K. broadcast aired the following day before planning anything. The family, a Palace aide told me, was keen to hear what the nation thought and see which way the wind was blowing in the court of public opinion. If the Sussexes—whose overall popularity in the country had been on a downward trajectory since they stepped away from their roles—received minimal sympathy from the British public, they would get minimal from the institution, too. After morning television hosts mocked Meghan’s stories, newspapers called the couple liars, and a nationwide poll found that more than a third of Britons (36 percent) had more sympathy with the royal family (compared to just 22 percent for the Sussexes), the Palace issued a carefully worded statement to mirror the public’s mixed reaction. “The issues raised, particularly that of race, are concerning,” Buckingham Palace included in a sixty-one-word riposte issued on behalf of the Queen. “While some recollections may vary, they are taken very seriously and will be addressed by the family privately.”
Those three words, recollections may vary, artfully submarined the issue by casting it as a he said–she said situation, effectively throwing the hounds off the scent without any mea culpas or promises of investigations. With a large swathe of the public instantly taking the side of the royal family, it felt like mission accomplished for Prince William’s then communications secretary Christian Jones and private secretary Jean-Christophe Gray, who helped devise the caveat during multiple drafts of the statement. They worked closely with Charles’s chief press aide, Julian Payne, on the perfect response “to plant that seed of doubt in people’s minds,” said a former staffer, who was also involved in communications efforts at the time. “The last thing they wanted was for people to start pointing fingers at the bosses [William and Kate].” Someone else also keen to protect the family’s reputation was Kate. Years later, The Times’ royal correspondent, Valentine Low, reported that the then Duchess of Cambridge was the one to suggest that the statement needed something to reflect how the institution “did not accept a lot of what had been said . . . [She] clearly made the point, ‘History will judge this statement and unless this phrase or a phrase like it is included, everything that they have said will be taken as true.’” A source later told me, “She was really passionate about defending the family.”
Two days later, when confronted by a reporter outside an East London school, Prince William helped reiterate the statement’s point, telling TV cameras, “We are very much not a racist family.” It was an unplanned response, but William—who admitted to a press secretary earlier in the day that he was “nervous” about stepping out—was keen to avoid any finger-pointing.
More than two years on and, other than Charles, no one in the family has spoken about the Archie conversations with the Sussexes. Meanwhile, the Palace has been on a mission to shift itself away from the perception they represent a racist institution. Less than three weeks after the Oprah interview, “royal sources” (in this case, Buckingham Palace’s head of communications speaking anonymously) confirmed plans to appoint a diversity chief, with the “full support” of the family. It was the first time that the royal establishment came close to admitting the important need for the institution’s inner workings to be diverse and representative of modern-day society. “We are listening and learning to get this right,” I was told at the time.
Unsurprisingly, it turned out to be lip service. Just three months later—after sharing a below-average employment diversity statistic in their 2020–2021 financial report (the first time such information had been publicly shared)—the Palace admitted it would be shelving plans for the diversity role. Though the position has not been completely ruled out for the future, a Palace source revealed that all staff were instead emailed a link to a “diversity survey” with tasks such as ranking (on a scale from “Strongly Disagree” to “Strongly Agree”) statements such as “This organisation really values diversity” and “I feel I am respected by my colleagues.” A former household employee scoffed, “Lord only knows what was done with the results . . . We never heard about it since.”
Change is not impossible. In recent years the Dutch royal family has led by example when it comes to addressing their own uncomfortable histories. In 2022, King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands commissioned independent research into the role of his family in the country’s colonial past. The royal personally hired three Dutch historians and a human rights expert to spend exactly three years on the study, including tracing links to the Dutch West India Company, which operated ships that trafficked an estimated six hundred thousand people into slavery over centuries. In tandem, the Dutch government apologized for the country’s role in slavery from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries and devoted €200 million to a fund promoting awareness of the colonial power’s role in slavery and €27 million to open a slavery museum. The king followed up with a powerful speech with his own apology on behalf of the family.
In April 2023, King Charles took the British royal family’s first baby step toward acknowledging the British monarchy’s own role in the slave trade by “supporting” a research project investigating the family’s ancestral links with transatlantic slavery. It followed the Guardian’s publication of a previously unseen document from 1689 clearly showing that the slave-trading Royal African Company transferred shares in the company to King William III. The collaborative doctoral partnership between the University of Manchester and Historic Royal Palaces (a charity that manages unoccupied royal residences) is allowing historian Camilla de Koning access to specific archives for a PhD thesis on the subject. Though de Koning’s collaborative work, which began in October 2022 and will conclude in 2026, would have happened with or without Charles’s support, his public show of interest is a start.
As I finished the pages of this book, a spokesperson for King Charles said the institution is still “committed” to improving diversity among household employees, particularly at the senior level. The monarch has, for example, heavily leaned on his former press secretary, Eva Omaghomi, who is now the director of community engagement, to work more closely with minority groups in the United Kingdom and across the Commonwealth. Charles, too, said a source, is planning to do more community-focused work. In August 2022, Charles guest-edited The Voice—Britain’s only national Black newspaper—and spoke about the importance of “unity through diversity.” In a letter properly acknowledging Black History Month in the United Kingdom, he wrote, “My hope is that we can consistently preserve and celebrate the histories of people of African, Caribbean and Asian heritage in Britain, and to expand this beyond Black History Month. Doing so will recognize the rich diversity of cultures and different minority ethnic groups that make this country so special—and in many ways unique.” While criticized as “hollow words” by some of its readers, Charles does have a history of supporting minority groups in Britain. In 1976 he launched the Prince’s Trust, which has gone on to give thousands of marginalized young people, many from Black communities, financial grants to set up their own enterprises and fulfill their potential. Before they found success, entrepreneurs such as menswear designer Ozwald Boateng, actors including Idris Elba and David Oyelowo, and many Black-owned businesses received support and grants from the charity’s various programs.
But it would be hasty to unreservedly believe that real change is on the horizon for the wider royal establishment just yet. In 2023, it was reported that 9.7 percent of employees in Buckingham Palace were from ethnic minority backgrounds (up from 9.6 percent the previous year) and Kensington Palace employed 16.3 percent (up from 13.6 percent). The numbers appear to be ticking up in the right direction, but a closer look at the senior staffers around royal family members reveals a predominantly white lineup (exclusively, in the case of communications team members and private secretaries at William and Kate’s household). It depressingly shows that the majority of non-white employees are at junior levels or working in more service industry–type positions (such as the hundreds of housekeeping staff helping maintain royal residences). There are also very few women in senior roles across both royal households. As for the Lord Chamberlain’s committee, the five department heads who form the core of it (the Lord Chamberlain, the King’s private secretary, the Keeper of the Privy Purse, the Master of the Household, and the office’s comptroller) are all older white men.
It’s a deep-seated problem, one that has gone unrectified for centuries and one that will take a long time to change. In the twenty-first century, baby steps aren’t enough, and incrementalism won’t appease recent cultural demands for revolutionary-size change. And it all starts by taking a hard look in the mirror and recognizing all the subtle and insidious ways racism rots away at the center. “Everything they said was going to happen hasn’t happened,” Harry commented in a January 2023 interview. “I’ve always been open to wanting to help them understand their part in it . . . For me, the difference is unconscious bias and racism, but if you are called out for unconscious bias you need to make that right, and you have the opportunity and the choice to. But if you choose not to, then that rapidly becomes something much more serious.” To put it another way, consciously ignoring or trying to brush away the once unconscious bias is, in and of itself, inherently racist.
The Firm’s incapacity—and seeming disinclination at times—to initiate substantive change or even take a truly committed and objective stance on their own history shows a disregard for what the twenty-first century’s unstoppable currents demand: cycle breaking and transformation. It demonstrates an unwillingness to truly accept, embrace, and protect what the Duchess of Sussex’s inclusion stood for beyond palace walls—how important it was for the millions of Black, Brown, and non-white people throughout Britain and the predominantly non-white Commonwealth to finally see a little of themselves represented in the monarchy because of Meghan’s presence, her background, and her union with Harry. Her role in the royal story symbolized a crack in a glass ceiling that many thought was impossible to touch. But instead of helping her when she needed it most, the Palace discounted her trauma, claiming in a calibrated, well-timed statement that when it comes to Meghan’s experiences, well, “recollections may vary.” Her story didn’t matter.
If Meghan’s presence didn’t alter anything within the royal family or the institution of the monarchy, then perhaps nothing will. The Firm doesn’t like to be told what to do—acclimation and change are not practices and values they have historically embraced. And a deferential press let them get away with it all, and, at times, has made it worse. The family’s past will forever discolor their legacy, and their refusal to comprehensively address much of it only deepens the stain. By their very existence, the royal family as a symbol perpetuates the notion of empire and the class system. As a result, it’s almost impossible to separate the three. To do so would require a full-scale operation geared toward redressing the Firm in modern colors and populating the institution with diverse opinions and forward-thinking ideas, including a new governing transparency. It’s a tall order for a monarchy that stretches back to 1066, and one that desperately relies on tradition, mystery, and memories of the grand old times for its survival. There are just too many blackamoor pieces and tainted historical artifacts that can be neither retained nor explained.
8
Gloves On
Prince William, Heir to the Throne
If you’re not careful, duty can sort of weigh you down an awful lot at a very early age and I think you’ve got to develop into the duty role.
—Prince William, 2016, BBC News interview
“I am growing up,” she thought . . . “I am losing some illusions . . . perhaps to acquire others,” and she descended among the tombs where the bones of her ancestors lay.
—Virginia Woolf, Orlando
A crusader is born. After the Sussexes’ allegations and William and Kate’s Caribbean debacle exposed the systemic discrimination within the royal institution, Prince William took the mantle in the Firm’s effort to distance itself from the continued assertions and presumptions that the royal family is a racist one. Immediately following the bigoted remarks of his godmother, Lady Susan Hussey, at Queen Camilla’s domestic violence event in November 2022, William hastened to rebuke her insensitive comments, even leapfrogging the Palace’s response to do so. Motivated by both justified anger and atonement for the monarchy’s recent blunders, William has now taken the campaign beyond palace walls to admonish and correct in other areas to set himself apart.
On March 18, 2023, he penned a letter to address disturbing claims from a youth football league manager in the north England town of Bradford. The manager had written to the national Football Association (FA) that many of his players—some as young as seven—are routinely subjected to racial abuse and threats of violence from adults on the sidelines, and he asked that the association do something about it. After an internal discussion, board members decided that William, the FA’s president-designate of seventeen years (an honorary title more than anything else), should be the one to publicly press the association’s executives to take action. The Prince of Wales wrote that he was “deeply concerned” and demanded that those involved “must be held accountable.” Not missing an opportunity to use the proverbial megaphone, William declared in his letter that “racism and abuse [have] no place in our society” and “abhorrent behaviour of this nature must stop now and all those responsible be held to account.”
It’s not the first time William has called out racism on the pitch. On three occasions he has advocated for eliminating racism in football, mainly at the higher levels of Britain’s Premier League and on international fields. In 2021, he joined a global chorus that condemned the racial abuse of England players after the team’s defeat in the Euro 2020 final, saying he was “sickened” by it and demanded it stop. As president of BAFTA, the British version of the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, he also used their 2020 awards ceremony to decry the lack of diversity in the world of film and television: “We find ourselves talking again about the need to do more to ensure diversity in the sector and in the awards process—that simply cannot be right in this day and age.” His reproach, along with those of many other public figures, hit the mark—the 2021 BAFTA nominees were slightly more diverse (although in 2023 it was criticized for falling behind once again, with a winners’ list dominated by white cast and crew members). While the royal institution has an embarrassingly poor record overall when it comes to racial issues, these organizations in which William holds honorary roles can’t afford to be seen as uninterested or unengaged—meaning the prince can’t sit back in silence like other family members.
Plus, said a Kensington Palace source, William is keen to be seen embracing his role as the young, forward-looking heir to the throne. As a close confidante permitted to speak for a 2021 Sunday Times profile said, William believes “the public look to him to keep royal work looking modern . . . [He is] carving out his relationship with diverse communities . . . as a way of doing things now that will help a smooth transition when the time comes.” It’s why in the past year his royal engagements have included a focus on often-overlooked groups, such as visiting the Hayes Muslim Centre in West London to support (and personally donate to) Britain’s earthquake relief efforts for Turkey and Syria. In terms of public opinion and optics, it’s a win-win for the next king.
While William is certainly solicitous and tolerant in his public role, a more complicated portrait emerges from his private life. What makes his recent civic outcries on racial issues look a tad opportunistic is the fact that he has yet to clear the air with his own brother regarding those cratering accusations of unconscious bias within the family. When the world watched Prince William proclaim “We are very much not a racist family” after the Sussex-Oprah sit-down, no one knew that, behind closed doors, some of the accusations his family was dealing with came from conversations about the Sussexes’ unborn son that he and his wife were well aware of. Privately, the issue had been addressed by Meghan and Charles in the letters they exchanged in the aftermath of the interview, but the King also felt the Duchess of Sussex should discuss her feelings with the Waleses, too. Two years on and neither Harry nor Meghan has received any word on the matter from William or Kate, whose reported push for a “recollections may vary”–style clause to be added to Buckingham Palace’s public response suggests the princess in particular may not agree with the Sussexes’ words. “The silence has caused a lot of confusion and upset,” said a source close to the family.
