According to the hype, Prince Harry’s forthcoming memoir will contain shocking revelations that are bound to shake the very foundation of the British monarchy.
Except that redoubtable British biographer Tom Bower just stole Harry’s thunder. In Revenge: Meghan, Harry and the War Between the Windsors, Bower rehashes hackneyed gossip with contumely relish (e.g., that Meghan made Kate cry in a row over bridemaids dresses days before marrying Harry).
Never mind that titillating revelations in books like “The Palace Papers,” TV series like “The Crown,” and of course that famous Oprah interview render even Bower’s putative exposé anticlimactic…
But what has the royals royally peeved is that Bower reveals what he claims is the racist insult that caused Harry to denounce his family and flee into exile in America.
As reported on Friday’s edition of The Times of London, he claims unimpeachable sources for the revelation that, when Harry first discussed marrying Meghan with Charles and Camilla, Camilla joked:
Wouldn’t it be funny if your child had ginger Afro hair?
Much ado about nothing
Boy, talk about dumbing racism down…
I am sure Harry has many good reasons to dislike Camilla. But, if this is all the evidence he has, after publicly insinuating that the whole royal family is racist, he (and his wife) owe the real victims of racism a public apology. Not least because, far from offensive, I find her quip, if true, funny … even endearing.
Of course, as we saw in their famous interview, racism’s the thing wherein Meghan clearly thinks she’ll prevail, where Diana failed, against The Firm. And what better way to play the race card than to enlist Oprah, the Ace of media spades, to stack the deck against the palace of institutional racism, the British Royal Family.
Meghan played the race card … and us
But I would like to think that, if Oprah knew this Camilla joke is what their fuss was all about, she would never have given them the time of day, let alone that big prime-time interview. Except that Harry and Meghan manipulated her (and us). Because they deliberately conveyed the impression that the racism that drove them out of the royal family had to do with a query about dark skin, not a quip about ginger hair.
More to the point, though, Harry would do well to appreciate that he’s seeing racism through the bi-racial lens of his woke and snowflake wife – whose opportunism clearly knows no bounds. No, black Americans do not need some ginger-haired, British royal grifter, living in exile in America, going to the UN to lecture the US government about rolling back our constitutional rights.
Meanwhile, Meghan seems to feel entitled to more royal deference than the queen – even in the presence of the queen herself.
The problem is that she invariably resorts to affectation, manipulation, and prevarication to give habitation to her self-entitlements. This is why, to avoid making a fool of himself and unwittingly offending black folks, Harry should temper his claims of racism accordingly.