A poster boy for a brave new Britain
His immigrant family’s generation suffered grotesque abuse. But in this joyously optimistic open letter, equalities guru TREVOR PHILLIPS tells why the first ever mixed-race royal can make us all proud
the first generation of senior royals where it wouldn’t matter whether you had been born male or female.
So every time we look at you we will see a symbol of an institution that has been willing to adapt, not just for its own sake, but in order to reflect change in our nation.
There’s more change to come that will put you centre stage. It should make you proud of our country — and us even more proud of you. Both my parents were black. When I was born, a mixed-race child like you was a rare and often shameful secret, all too frequently put up for adoption by horrified grandparents. When your mother was born in 1981, her parents’ marriage had only recently become recognised as legal in some parts of the U.S.
As late as the Seventies, it was almost unthinkable that a white student could take a black boyfriend or girlfriend home to meet the parents without risking a family quarrel. As a consequence, most never even tried.
But by the time you are ready to attend senior school, half of us with a Caribbean slave ancestor are more likely than not to also have a white parent or grandparent. There will be more black Britons like you than like me.
You are the fruit of a joyous, contemporary love match. Social scientist Eric Kaufmann of Birkbeck, University of London, thinks this is the Western world’s future, and that over your lifetime what we call ‘race’ could become near to irrelevant. You will be the poster boy for this new world.
THAT’S
going to put some responsibility to be a bridge between white Britain and black Britain on your shoulders. Everyone will be watching to see how you manage being the inheritor of two very different traditions.
But it’s not down to you to make this work. It’s for us as a nation to make the decision as to whether we embrace the future you embody, and make sure both sides of you are equally at home in the UK.
In the meantime, relax. Take your time to be yourself. By the way, this is how the rest of Summertime goes: One of these mornings You’re gonna rise up singing You’ll spread your wings And you’ll take to the sky.’ I can’t wait to see you soar.
WHEN he penned the famous lullaby in Gershwin’s Porgy And Bess, lyricist DuBose Heyward could have been imagining your Mum and Dad: Summertime, and the livin’ is easy Fish are jumpin’ and the cotton is high Oh, your daddy’s rich and your ma is good lookin’ So hush, little baby, don’t you cry
of course, not all your family were so fortunate. Some had to make their own luck. Grandma Doria has never looked out of place among the aristocrats and celebrities that swarm around your Dad’s family. Yet her own grandparents worked as lowly staff in a segregated hotel, a universe away from the palaces in which you will grow up.
Part of my excitement about your arrival is simply down to the fact that, like some of your ancestors, I am a dark-skinned descendant of Africans.
of course, you probably aren’t unique in royal history. George III’s Prussian wife, Sophie Charlotte, was said to have African ancestry through the Portuguese side of her family. And one historic role of royalty has always been to mix people of very different backgrounds and link us by blood to other nations.
For the past 100 years we’ve been ruled over by an Anglo-Scottish- German- Greek family which has come to define what it looks like to be British.
This kind of multiculturalism works. You don’t need to have watched Game of Thrones to see how the ties of kinship play a role in keeping warring tribes at peace. And, come to think of it, I imagine that after you discover some of your own family’s thousand-year-long backstory — full of political intrigue, plotting, betrayal, wanton violence, madness and strange carryings- on in the royal bedchambers — nothing much will surprise you.
So I can’t see that anyone in your family is going to be in the least bit bothered about your colour. Sure, they may be a tad bemused by the conversation that usually follows the arrival of a new baby in a black family: ‘Good hair or bad hair?’
It only makes sense after you’ve had to spend hours combing out the tangled locks of a black child screaming as though the Spanish Inquisition is applying the hot poker!
More likely, you’ll be an excuse for people to talk rot about your relatives. When your Mum and Dad got married, there was a lot of silliness written about how uncomfortable your father’s family were at having a black preacher and a gospel choir at their nuptials.
Nonsense! This is a family that lives the reality of a multicultural world daily. It’s their job: to interact with people of different backgrounds to themselves on behalf of the nation, and to treat them all with respect. I have to tell you, they are pretty good at it.
You
wouldn’t catch them muttering dismissively about never seeing so many people of one race in a single place ( as a certain ‘ woke’ newscaster did recently).
And let’s not forget that when Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher threatened to divide the Commonwealth over its opposition to Apartheid, it was Her Majesty, your great grandma, who stood up for the multi-racial alliance.
According to Cabinet papers, she simply let it be known she might cancel her weekly meeting with the PM — the closest the sovereign can come to staring down her head of government. Guess who buckled!
As for the rest of us here in Britain, outside of the looney tunes on Twitter and elsewhere, I’d say we’re over that racial rubbish. So unless you become a professional footballer, I don’t think you’re going to experience much open racial hostility.
And that’s nothing to do with your family. It’s because I think you’re going to grow up in a generation that sees your mixed-race heritage as something that makes you interesting rather than inferior.
Even if your parents send you to one of those posh fee-paying schools, you’ll find yourself sitting alongside at least as many boys and girls of colour as you would at the average comprehensive — many the children of striving immigrants working a second or third job to give their kids the education that is the best passport to a better future than theirs.
Whether you like it or not, you’re going to have a special place in the nation’s heart. You are one element in what your Dad’s family is doing to drag the royal part of our constitution into the modern age.
under the watchful eye of one of the great political geniuses of our age, your greatgrandmother Elizabeth, the monarchy has managed to maintain its stabilising influence on our nation, largely by slowly, subtly, but deliberately, changing itself.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the leadership Her Majesty has given in recognising the diversity of modern Britain. Take the Royal Family’s role in the extraordinary Windrush story that has come to symbolise the wave of post-war migration into Britain.
Famously, the boat brought 492 West Indians to London in 1948 — mostly young men who had fought for the Empire in the war, returning in search of adventure and a new life in the ‘mother country’.
When your great-grandmother came to the throne, people like my parents — part of that first wave — saw themselves as her loyal subjects. But they quickly learned that to others they were to be kept outside the pale of polite society.
Even though we were devout Christians, many churches refused to welcome us; we worshipped in small congregations that were forced to assemble and sing hymns in our tiny front rooms.
If anyone thought kindly of us at all, it was at best as great entertainers and cricketers, rather than as friends, neighbours and equals.
At worst, we were seen as threatening, shiftless outcasts, to be treated with suspicion and best suited to peddling dope and prostitution.
Even people on council estates looked down on us. The law allowed them to pass their homes on to their friends and relatives, and for the most part they used that privilege to make sure that their families would never have to live next to an immigrant.
We were condemned to inhabiting rat- infested tenements that were owned by exploitative landlords ready to turf us out at a moment’s notice if a better offer came along.
The best we thought we could do was to hold down a decent job in a uniform — as nurses like my sister, or posties like my dad. And, of course, our parents — and everyone else — thought we’d only be here as long as it took to help get Britain back on its feet after the war.
When my brother Mike and I published our book Windrush, 50 years on from the journey, no one really knew about that boat and its significance in Britain’s social history. Yet since then it has featured in TV, radio, novels and the London 2012 olympic opening ceremony.
It has inspired songs and plays, and even become a byword for government incompetence. It led to the forced resignation of a senior Cabinet minister last year after it emerged there had been wrongful detentions and deportations of some members of the Windrush generation.
NONE
of this might have happened without a bold and unprecedented royal gesture which guaranteed our Windrush story would be etched into the nation’s memory.
In 1998, my brother and I were stunned to be told that the Royal Family had decided to hold a reception for the Windrush survivors, and wanted us to draw up a list of guests.
Such an event could not have taken place without the Queen’s active consent, and for many within the black community it put the royal seal on what had been a long journey from rejection to inclusion.
I recall some elderly voyagers brimming with tears as they met senior members of ‘ the Firm’ — a family for whom so many of them had risked their lives in battle.
A country that half a century earlier had greeted them with cold hostility, and even violence, had finally embraced them.
No one can pretend that everything is perfect, but given the choice, there’s no question that any person of colour who comes to live in Europe will feel most comfortable in the uK.
All that said, you are going to add a unique new element to our nation’s story. You are the first child in almost three centuries to bring Africa back into the royal gene pool.
You are seventh in line to the throne — and everything you bring with you will now be part of the public life of our nation.
That’s another thing. Since the law on royal succession changed, you belong to