just a reminder: the british royal family is no friend of black people

Hooray! A biracial woman who doesn’t identify as Black is becoming part of one of the most violent and imperialist institutions in the history of the planet… Wait, what?

Given that the media propagates the idea that we, too, are supposed to celebrate all things the royal family deems celebratory, the actual implications of Suits actress Meghan Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry have gone overlooked by many. The truth is, the “royal” part of the royal family has been made off the violence of slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, and that violence has never been accounted for, and never will be.

I’m not just talking about Prince Harry’s penchant for dressing up as a Nazi or getting teachers fired after allegedly forcing them to cheat for them. I’m not even talking about Prince Philip’s 1986 warning to a British exchange student in China that if he stayed there too long, he’d go “slitty-eyed,” or telling the president of Nigeria that his garments looked like he was ready to go to bed. I’m talking about how everything the family is celebrated for is due to exploiting the work of others, for centuries and through today.

The wealth of the royal family, including <a href=”http://the millions of pound hidden offshore, is due in large part to slavery, which they both propagated and the abolition of which they fought strongly against. Less than 100 years ago, Britain governed a fifth of the world’s population, committing countless acts of genocide and other brutalities against the people they ruled, believing themselves inherently superior.
This lends itself to the racist beliefs held by central members family itself, such as Prince William’s recent comments about the need to ‘take measures’ to curb “Africa’s rapidly growing human population”.

Some people are celebrating these impending nuptials simply because it makes the overt racists who hate to see Markle with the prince upset, and that is understandable.

But we can no longer focus our attention on overt racism, missing the trees for the forest. The fact is, imperialism is, by many accounts, a far bigger problem than random internet trolls, and we would be wise to start treating it as such.

The monarchy of the British Empire is a “structurally racist and elitist institution“. Imperialism and the destruction that comes from it are not over.