A guest on Fox News argued Thursday that the British royal family couldn’t possibly be racist because many of the queen’s colonial subjects are Black and Asian.
“I don’t think the royal family is racist,” said Richard Mineards, a columnist for California’s Montecito Journal, shown in a clip posted by watchdog Media Matters.
“You’ve got to remember that for nearly half a century, the queen has been the head of the Commonwealth, which is a number of lands around the world that were from the colonial days, and the majority of the people who live in those lands are Black or Asian.
“So the queen is far from being a racist, and I don’t think the royal family as a whole is racist, as William said this morning in London.”
Buckingham Palace has been rocked by racism accusations following Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s interview with Oprah Winfrey, which aired Sunday on CBS. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex said the royal family expressed concerns over “how dark” their son’s skin would be when he was born.
The guest on the conservative network prompted an uproar with his remark, as critics wondered if he recalled how the Commonwealth acquired those lands. Many member states were former territories that the British Empire took by force, and were part of its history of aggressive colonialism and slavery.
Former Brexit Party leader Nigel Farage offered a similarly astonishing line of reasoning Wednesday on right-wing network Newsmax.
“The queen and the royal family have spent the last 70 years touring around the Commonwealth,” he said. “The vast majority of those people are Black and Asian. I would put it to you that nobody in the world, in history, has done more for people of color than the British royal family.”
Mineard’s argument Thursday left many viewers stunned.