‘Meghan shows us we can’t keep having the same conversation about race’
I’M TIRED and I know I’m not the only one. The Oprah Winfrey interview with Meghan and Harry was nothing short of incendiary – shock waves rippling out from the former seat of colonial power. Horror and outrage has ensued, much of it centred around the announcement that a royal had expressed concern about Archie’s complexion (although the Queen’s statement said ‘recollections may vary’). The underlying implication: would his African ancestry be visible? Would Archie be able to ‘pass’?
Racist ideology present in the royal family? Nooooo! It couldn’t be so. Cue countless discussions of opposing views. One side insists, ‘It’s not racist,’ while the other is adamant that it is, and so it goes on ad infinitum. As an approach it does little to shift attitudes, or make any real change to entrenched and endemic racism.
I am so tired of it all. I don’t want us to still be having this conversation in 20, 10, even five years from now.
A better understanding of history would bypass all of the denial and racial gaslighting, the ‘shock’ and ‘surprise’ that racism might actually exist. The starting point could be the mainstreaming of knowledge about the invention of the ‘white’ race. It was as recently as 1661 that the English introduced the idea of ‘white people’, and codified it into law in colonial Barbados; from there the concept spread. One reason for its creation was to shut down solidarity that was emerging between Irish and English labourers and the enslaved Africans they worked alongside, and also to convince the European poor that their interests were aligned with their landlords, rather than with enslaved Africans, with whom they had more in common.
Central to this concept of whiteness was the idea of a white superiority and, by extension, ‘black inferiority’, which became a cornerstone of English identity, as well as in many other countries that came to understand themselves as ‘white’.
With this understanding we could drop the exhausting replay of shock, horror and denial in regards to whether individual acts are racist or not and move on. I do not say this in an accusatory way, simply that, in our increasingly divided times, we must see that our framing of conversations about race don’t work. My book, What White People Can Do Next, proposes the following manifesto (right):