The Royal Family in this country are now slightly less pale. The bride requested an African priest to give a benediction at the ceremony. I was talking with a friend today about how this is a big break from tradition, good and significant in its own right, but I have other friends have talked about this event in very negative terms, that having a black priest does a lot of whitewashing for an institution that once enslaved, raped and violated black people.
Both those views are right in their way, but I personally am closer to the latter, and where you fall depends I think on whether you believe actions speak louder than words.
Laws that explicitly discriminate are off the books in this country, although with the Windrush scandal we’ve seen how you can pass an apparently neutral law that gives racists the tools to produce the same kind of injustice. But the more overt racism of our country’s past lives on in another form, because as long as you can inherit wealth within families, the wealth that was obtained through slavery is a stain.
It costs the royals nothing in the context of modern Britain to marry an individual who racists might object to. Fifty years ago, maybe, but today the work has been done and any racist objections to this marriage won’t get broad popular support.
In this sense, the wedding may be different, but ultimately it’s an aesthetic difference. It’s a break with tradition, but it’s meaningful in the same sense that Queen Hillary getting elected president would have been a break with tradition. It’s not a change in the most fundamental ways, and for me the most important. To me the royals are just celebrities, they’re significant only in the sense that they can influence people I actually know.
So what if their family is getting more liberal? A bit of diversity in genetics reflects modern Britain far better. That might make us a bit more invested in the idea that the royals represent us personally, but it’s equally likely that people will see through the diversity optics and the Royals will keep getting less relevant. Who knows? But here’s the thing – they are more liberal, but that doesn’t mean their actions are going to be any braver or better.
After the collapse of Franco’s fascist Spain in the 1970s, the king was restored to the throne. He could have carried on as before, but instead he helped reform the country and abdicated his power to a democracy. When fascists launched a coup in 1981, Juan Carlos, even though he had no official power, went on television begging people to respect democracy for the sake of their country. It was a great personal risk given the forces at play, but it worked; he almost single-handedly prevented a second civil war that would have left Spain in ruins.
I’m no monarchist but that was very brave; even the communists in Spain respected him after that. Fourty years later there’s another war germinating in the minds of the lunatics who run the west, this time against Iran. Do you really think that if another Blair gets into power the Royals will raise their voice in protest? I don’t. They don’t have any official power so they couldn’t constitutionally stop that, like they couldn’t have stopped the Iraq invasion, but they also don’t have anything to lose. I still don’t think they would. They’re liberal, but they’re still part of an establishment wracked with a corrupt ideology, and they own too many shares in BAE systems.
They could put all the art treasures that their family stole back in the countries that they once pillaged, they could give all the houses and land that they bought from the proceeds of slavery away, and use their influence for the good of society. I’m not against people with influence doing good work! The royals have lots of charitable operations, mainly as a tax dodge but whatever, there’s still good things they could do and they could live with some dignity, in my eyes at least. But actions speak louder than words at the end of the day. I won’t celebrate them or even pay them much mind until I see them act differently.
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All this could apply to me, of course. There’s been no slaveowners in my family to my knowledge, but I’m sure there’s been killers and thieves in the past. More personally, my grandfather worked for the colonials in Zambia, where my dad was born. He’s a decent man of moral courage; he once got severely disciplined for firing his boss’s batman, who was an abusive shithead, while the boss was away. But he was a cog in an evil machine. My grandad gave all his money to psychics already, but I’ve still benefited indirectly from the position and security he had.
But I can’t give up my upbringing. It’s impossible to, besides, and I don’t think benefiting from that kind of arrangement has blinded me to the nature of it; I don’t want to be a part of perpetuating similar crimes. I have to make a better world in whatever small way I can, and I think the same applies to the Royal family. That’s one of the reasons I can’t hate them.
No, I don’t hate them as people, in spite of the fact that they’re invested in instruments of death and sit on a pile of skulls. I actually pity them more than many rich families, because their more public life gives occasional signs that they once could have been perfectly nice people, that they could even have been happier without their crowns. Everyone knows Prince Phillip would rather be the captain of a ship. I think Elizabeth would be way less strange (like, eccentric in the good way) if she was a nice old lady who lived on my street and had a sensible, sensical life, whose husband took her out on his wee boat from time to time, making tea in the tiny galley and eating shortcake.
That’s probably true of many rich people. Some of them are glassy-eyed psychopaths, but some have had their empathy circuits burned out through years of being told avarice was virtuous, that they were creating jobs and making the world better. They’ve got money poisoning; they think they’re gonna be happier with sixty million in the offshore account rather than fifty; they have a legitimate addiction to hoarding money and end up committing exploitation and evil in the process of making more, in the same way a junkie might sell their mum’s stereo to keep themselves dosed up.
No person should have a billion pounds; the crimes it lets you commit are horrible, it’s money deprived from the people who actually did the work to lift you to such stratospheric heights, and it’s the kind of power that taints your spirit even if you start out with the best intentions. They’ve got to give it away, or have it be taken from them, or have it become meaningless, before they can start the healing.
It is our duty as humans to start the healing.