Markel's Royal Row, Like Spencer's, Will Ensure Nothing Changes
March 11, 2021
What the Oprah interview does - is designed to do - is derail the
intersection of class and race in politically damaging ways, writes Jonathan
Cook.
Buckingham Palace, 2007. (Globe Trotteur, CC BY-ND 2.0)
By Jonathan Cook
Jonathan-Cook.net
Oprah Winfrey's interview with Meghan and Harry is a perfect case study of
how an important political debate about the corrupting role of the monarchy
on British life gets shunted aside yet again, not just by the endless Royal
soap opera but by supposedly progressive identity politics.
As so often, a focus on identity risks not only blunting our capacity for
critical thinking but can be all too readily weaponized: in this case, as
the media's main take-away from the Oprah interview illustrates, by
providing an implicit defense of class privilege.
The racism directed at Markle - sorry, the Duchess of Sussex - and baby
Archie is ugly, it goes without saying (but maybe more to the point, must be
stated to avoid being accused of ignoring or trivializing racism).
The concern expressed by a senior royal during Markle's pregnancy about
Archie's likely darker skin color does indeed reveal how deeply ingrained
racism is in the British establishment and how much it trickles down to the
rest of British society, not least through the billionaire-owned media.
Princely 'Birthright'
But more significant is how the racism demonstrated towards Markle and
Archie has played out in the media coverage of the interview and the
resulting "national conversation" on social media - nowadays, the only real
barometer we have for judging such conversations.
The problem is that, via Oprah, the Sussexes get to frame the significance
of the House of Windsor's racism: both in the threat that, when Charles
ascends to the throne, grandson Archie will be deprived of his princely
"birthright" because he is of mixed race; and in the fact that Harry and
Meghan have been hounded from Palace life into celebrity-style exile in the
U.S.
In the process, an important, democratic conversation has yet again been
supplanted about why Britain still maintains and reveres these expensive
relics of a medieval system of unaccountable rule based on a superior (if no
longer divine) blood line.
Instead, the conversation initiated by Oprah is a much more politically
muddled one about whether it is right that a "commoner" woman of color and
her mixed-race son are obstructed from fully participating in this medieval
system of privilege.
Image Makeover
A real political debate about privilege - one that demands greater equality
and an end to racist presumptions about blood lines - has been obscured and
trivialized once again by a row of the kind preferred by the corporate
media: whether most of the Royal Family are too racist to realize that a
woman of color like Meghan could help them with a 21st-century image
makeover.
As a result, we are presented with a false binary choice. Either we cheer on
the Royal Family and implicitly condone their racism; or we cheer on Meghan
and implicitly support her battle to better veil the feudal ugliness of the
British monarchy.
It ought to be possible to want Archie to live a life equal to "white"
babies in the U.K. without also wanting him to live a life of pomp and
circumstance, designed to ensure that other babies - white, black and brown
- grow up to be denied the privileges he enjoys by virtue of royal birth.
Divisive & Enervating
What the Oprah interview does - is designed to do - is derail the
intersection of class and race in politically damaging ways.
A meaningful democratic struggle prioritizes class unity as the battering
ram against establishment power that long ago learnt to protect itself by
dividing us through our competing identities. Class struggle does not ignore
race; it embraces it and all other socially constructed identities used by
power to rationalize oppression. Class subsumes them into a collective
struggle strengthened by numbers.
Struggle based on identity, by contrast, is inherently divisive and
politically enervating, as the Markle case illuminates. Her challenge to
Royal "tradition" alienates those most invested in ideas of monarchy,
"Britishness" or white identity. And it does so while offering no more than
a sop to those invested in breaking glass ceilings, even of the kind that
aren't worth smashing in the first place.
Meghan's fight for the first mixed-race British prince is no more
politically progressive than the celebration by the media two years ago of
the news that for the first time women were in charge of the
military-industrial complex - the one that rains down death and destruction
on "Third World" men, women and children.
Value for Money
Strange as it is to recall now - in an age of social media, when anyone can
comment on anything, and the "mainstream" media's billionaire gatekeepers
have supposedly been sidelined - ordinary Britons discussed abolishing the
monarchy far more in the 1970s, when I was a child, than they do nowadays.
Getting rid of the Royal Family - like getting rid of nuclear weapons,
another topic no one talks about seriously any more - was mainstream enough
then that Royalists were often forced on to the defensive. As the mood
soured among a vocal section of the population, the Queen's defenders were
forced hurriedly to switch from arguments rooted in deference and tradition
to more utilitarian claims that the Royals offered "value for money,"
supposedly boosting commerce and tourism.
Prince Charles' engagement in 1981 to a beautiful, demure teenage "English
rose," Princess Diana Spencer, looked to many, even at the time,
suspiciously like a move to reinvigorate a tired, increasingly unpopular
brand.
The media spectacle of a fairytale romance and wedding, followed by years of
controversy, disillusionment and betrayal, culminating in divorce and
finally Diana's death, very effectively distracted the British public for
the next 16 years from the question of what purpose a Royal Family served.
It became only too clear what role they played: they kept us engrossed in a
real-life, better-than-TV drama.
Champions of Identity
Diana's supposed struggle to grow from adolescence to womanhood in the glare
of media intrusion and under the strictures of "The Firm" created the
prototype for a new type of apolitical, Mills and Boon-style identity
politics.
Following Diana's escapades - from the secular saint who cleared landmines
to the raunchy princess who had illicit sex with her riding instructor, an
army major no less - was far more thrilling than the campaign to end the
monarchy and the regressive landed class it still represents.
Diana's life story helped pave the way to the reinvention of the left
through the 1990s - under Tony Blair in the U.K. and Bill Clinton in the
U.S. - as champions of a new social issues-obsessed non-politics.
Both were ushered into power after reassuring the newly triumphant corporate
elite that they would harness and divert popular energy away from dangerous
struggles for political change towards safe struggles for superficial social
change.
In the U.K., that was achieved most obviously in Blair's assiduous courtship
of media mogul Rupert Murdoch. Importantly, Blair persuaded Murdoch that, as
prime minister, he would not only preserve the economic legacy of the
Thatcher years but head further down the path of deregulation.
Murdoch - himself no fan of a British monarchy that had always looked down
on him as a vulgar Australian - also understood that the inevitable soap
opera quality of exceptional individuals battling the U.K.'s rigid hierarchy
of privilege, spurred on by Blair's New Labour, would prove great for sales
of his newspapers. Just as Oprah knows that the only tangible consequence of
the Harry and Meghan interview is that it will rake in many more millions
for her own media empire.
Sticking It to the Man
In the new era of identity-saturated non-politics, demands for equality mean
removing obstacles so that more women, people of color and the LGBT
community can participate in institutions that represent power and
privilege.
These battles are not about overthrowing those systems of privilege, as
earlier identity-based struggles such as the Black Panthers' were. Success
serves simply to placate identity-focused groups by helping those of most
"merit" elbow their way into the preserves of established power.
Those achievements started with the most visible, least significant areas of
the economy, such as sport and celebrity, and led over time to greater
access to the professions.
The current excitement among some on the left at Meghan's "Sticking It to
the Man" appears to derive from the disruptive threat she poses to the House
of Windsor - not to its economic, social and political power, but to its
status as the last hold-out against Blair's identity-fueled "revolution."
Narrative Twist
Diana's emancipation story helped distract us for nearly two decades from
confronting central questions about the nature and role of the British
establishment in preserving and veiling power.
Now Meghan Markle is expanding the identity story in a new direction, one
that once again embraces the story of a young, "headstrong" woman scorned by
the Royal Family for snubbing tradition. But this time there is an alluring
contemporary twist to the narrative: the Family's resistance to diversity
and its refusal to own its racist past.
Unlike Diana who stood alone and seemingly fragile, Meghan and Harry offer a
more relevant, modern picture of a confident, professional young couple
standing and fighting together for what is fair, for what should be theirs
by right.
This feels important, bold and empowering. But it is the precise opposite.
It is more Mills and Boons, but this time with diversity thrown in to
generate more appeal on one side and more hostility on the other.
Meghan's story will continue to work its magic: fascinating, infuriating and
pacifying us in equal measure as we focus on what is private, unknowable and
can be endlessly contested rather than what is universal, visible and
impossible to refute.
Meanwhile, the Royal Family, the perpetuation of privilege and the erosion
of democracy will march on as before, in the same long and glorious British
tradition.
Jonathan Cook is a former Guardian journalist (1994-2001) and winner of the
Martha Gellhorn Special Prize for Journalism. He is a freelance journalist
based in Nazareth. If you appreciate his articles, please consider
