The coronation of King Charles III is set for May 6. It will be the first coronation the British royal family has seen in 70 years since the late Queen Elizabeth II stepped up to the throne. The event is hotly anticipated, and Americans will likely wake their happy asses up early to watch, as they did for the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle in 2018.
I expect the coronation to preempt or dominate all local news on Saturday morning, given Western media’s unyielding obsession with the goings-on of British royalty. Just before starting this piece, I received a news alert about Harry and Meghan attending a Lakers playoff game together.
I’d be more interested in reading a story about Al Gore painting his fence.
As someone whose interest in the United Kingdom generally starts with “Ted Lasso” and ends with British actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw, I’ve been annoyed by our collective fascination with the royals for some time. Considering we had an entire war to distance ourselves from Great Britain, the obsession, for some Black folks, has an Uncle Ruckus-slash-Stephen-from-“Django Unchained” veneer of oppressor admiration.
We’re here because there are reasons why “princess” is one of the first things a young lady is called fresh out of the womb. Many of us grew up with the fantasy of (white Western) royalty jammed into our eyelids via Disney films and those Random House hardcover children’s books from the 1990s. There’s also that nagging obsession with the wealth, nobility, titles and prestige that we’ll never get from working the cell phone counter at Best Buy.
Because we care so much, the news cycle churns it out for us like truffle butter, and the only way to avoid it is to throw your devices into a body of water. When Prince Harry released his memoir “Spare” in January, it felt like news alerts popped up for every three paragraphs of material.
“As someone whose interest in the United Kingdom generally starts with ‘Ted Lasso’ and ends with British actor Gugu Mbatha-Raw, I’ve been annoyed by our collective fascination with the royals for some time.”
The irony of our obsession with the Brits is that Americans are also enchanted with the imperialistic aspect of royalty: We like our kings ruling with an iron fist and with a sharp guillotine when conspirators fall out of line. But it’s been centuries since the British monarchy had that kind of power.
The royal family has not meaningfully governed the United Kingdom in basically forever — the prime minister and Cabinet run the country. The ministers keep King Charles abreast of what’s going on, but they aren’t required to bend to any of his whims. Essentially, Charles’ role is that of parsley on a plate…if said parsley had bottomless wealth.
My guess is if more Americans knew about this power structure, they might stay in bed a bit longer on Thursday morning.
I’m even more appalled when Black people are into the Crown, considering that there should be a picture of the royal coat of arms next to “racism” in the dictionary. It reminds me of when all the rappers named themselves after Italian mobsters who likely flung around the N-word like birdseed.
Black Twitter, Irish Twitter, Indian Twitter and pretty much any marginalised Twitter group formed like Voltron following the death of Queen Elizabeth II last September because she somehow ran afoul of each of those groups at some point during her record 70-year run.
It’s not as if Elizabeth’s transgressions are in some distant “Bridgerton”-esque past of powdered wigs and petticoats — she headed an institution that banned “coloured immigrants or foreigners” from clerical and office roles since your mama has been alive, shielding herself from the consequences of rank bigotry in the process. (Academic Kehinde Andrews wrote a great piece detailing why Elizabeth was “probably the number one symbol of white supremacy.”)
So, how did we really expect the monarchy to feel about Markle being (kinda) the first Black Royal? And how are we expected to believe that she didn’t realize she was marrying into the preeminent white supremacist family?
Markle might represent the apotheosis of willful ignorance, but I don’t buy that a Northwestern University graduate was as shocked as Oprah seemed to be when Markle told her that the family had “concerns” over the complexion of their child, as if Harry and Markle would produce someone who’d ever be mistaken for Wesley Snipes.
Every woman I know does at least some cursory research on the family they’re marrying into, but most of them don’t have the benefit of a library’s worth of books that Markle had. But then, we’re talking about a Black woman who married a man who, at some point in his adulthood, had the presence of mind to dress as a swastika-emblazoned Nazi soldier.
Harry and Markle’s defection from the royal family is ambrosia for those who miss the love triangle scuttlebutt between Princess Diana, Charles and Camilla Parker-Bowles, which might have been rivaled in 1990s sensationalism only by the O.J. Simpson trial. To me, it simply drew a bright red line under the fact that the Crown has no interest in doing away with its historical bigotry and made me wonder why so many were excited about the Harry/Meghan wedding.
The sophistic reasoning many offered was that Markle would “shake up” and singlehandedly end the monarchy’s generational white supremacy simply by being in the family, which is risible considering she now lives back on American soil and her husband is estranged from the family. Markle’s enemies won ... score one for progress!
I won’t go all hotep on you and suggest that there are “bigger concerns” than the royal family or that the news alerts are just a “distraction” from the fact that Starbucks now requires 200 stars for a free damn drink.
But I do believe these royal clowns are afforded a degree of attention in the media that isn’t commensurate with what they accomplish in the 21st century. I don’t really care that you care so much … I just wish to reclaim my news alerts, and that starts with you.