You probably won’t remember this, considering everything that followed, but when Harry and Meghan got married, there was a popular view in the media that their union was a watershed moment for British race relations. The wedding, we were told, cast a spell on black, white and mixed-race people alike, enchanted by the nods to Meghan’s Afro-American cultural heritage during the ceremony. “A new era dawns,” a New York Times headline read. “Modern” was a word often used to describe the pair. A modern wedding, for a modern couple, in a modern Britain.
This new era did not dawn. But the prophecies of it are useful to revisit, because they should remind us that it didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. Because the country that Harry and Meghan married in was one that, just a few months before their wedding, declared Paulette Wilson, who had lived in Britain for 50 years, “removable to Jamaica” and detained her in Yarl’s Wood. The Windrush scandal was also “modern” Britain.
The diversity and inclusion struggles of rich, famous people say little about the country as a whole outside the lives of those rich, famous people. But even though they are tiny in number, they are gigantic in influence. Their ability to amplify their grievances means that we plot the racial history of this country via the journeys of its least relevant protagonists, such as princes and Hollywood actors. These figures inhabit such a different universe that not even their publicists are grounded enough to tell them that complaining in a Netflix documentary that the ceilings of their temporary palace cottage were too low is not something they should be attempting to solicit sympathy for.
To most people, there was as little at stake in their union as there was in their leaving the royal family. Harry and Meghan entered no promised land, and their departure does not add them to some rebel army. The couple’s essential charge, that a status based on bloodline superiority was not distributed equally to them, cannot be credibly stretched to encompass any wider anti-racism – or anti-anything, really – politics.
If there’s one thing that is apparent from their recent documentary, it is that they are not renouncing their unearned right to royalty, but are angry that they could not claim it. Asking for tolerance is one thing, but asking for tolerance of feudalism built on institutionalising inequality, tax breaks and legal exemptions for sovereign billionaires? As far as the royal family are concerned, they don’t want a coup: they want their cut.
They will be seen as informal ambassadors for race relations anyway. Harry and Meghan, in good times and bad, are burdened with these expectations because in Britain we like talking about racism when the stakes are low and the profile of the protagonists is high. People such as Meghan, and occasionally black footballers and artists, have the privilege of being our “discussion starters”, triggering discourse where we rinse and repeat arguments about whether Britain is racist or not.
The trouble with this is that it traps and smothers any meaningful conversation – because we end up talking about racism as the way people are treated, and not about the jeopardy racism leaves people in. These two forms of prejudice are both legitimate, but one is about the easily debated and trivialised inconveniences of being in a white space, and the other is about the right to survive in any place at all. One is about making assumptions about where you are from; the other is about sending you back there.
Policing travesties regularly visited on black men; black toddlers dying in mouldy apartments; disease, death and sexual assault in the illegally crowded asylum processing system: none of these issues are reflected in the grievances of those whose main experience of racism is how uncomfortable Britain’s elite white institutions are.
The experience of Harry and Meghan, or any number of similar figures in public life, is limited. More importantly, it cannot flow downstream. It cannot ever become about the Home Office, or the black unemployment rate, or the black prison population. Their gripes with the press focus only on the treatment of them as royals, never extending the very short distance to understanding that celebrities are only part of a business model for some papers whose bread and butter is the constant hammering of, and misinformation about, migrants, Muslims and other minorities.
That we can treat Harry and Meghan’s experience as something that other minorities can reap any dividends from shows just how far we are from any serious discussion of race in Britain, how we are constantly marshalled in the direction of reducing racism to skirmishes expressed in the language of hurt feelings and symbolic gestures. A country’s minorities are crying out for better policing, housing and healthcare, but instead they are faced with a debate over which princess made the other one cry over a bridesmaid dress – and whether footballers should kneel before a game.
Inadvertently complicit in this is a cohort of ethnic minority Britons who do see a little of themselves in Meghan: in her loneliness as an outsider, and the disgusting treatment she receives by entitled boors such as Piers Morgan and Jeremy Clarkson, who last week said he’d like to see her paraded naked and pelted with excrement. Some people can relate to her pain and shock that her race really does matter after all despite achievement and application, and in her frustration that no matter how hard you try, you are constantly told you do not belong, in subtle, devious and often humiliating ways. Trust me, I get it. But these experiences, painful and scarring as they are, are restricted to a particular class, and can never make up the sum total of demands for equality. Everyone’s experiences matter, of course, no matter how privileged; but societies that do not want to confront racism, that require heavy investment of resources in reforming institutions and processes that fail people of colour, motivate ethnic minorities to stay away from the political and focus on the personal.
The unfortunate timing of the documentary – coming as it does during what is effectively a national strike, a cost of living crisis and a winter that has started to bite – should alert us to the fact that, as when they got married, Harry and Meghan are not a reflection of the country’s successes or a resolution of its crises. They have clearly gone through some real unpleasantness and what seem like genuinely traumatic experiences with extremely powerful parties in the royal family and the media. I believe them. I hope, as much as I can for two people I do not know, that they make peace with what happened to them, and do so on their own terms. Let’s leave them to it, shall we?
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
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