I’m critical of Harry and Meghan. This isn’t news. But I always try to limit my criticism to their strategy and actions – the staged photoshoots, the tone-deaf private jet flights, the cries for privacy as they appear on web streams and TV specials.
But there is a different type of criticism of Harry and Meghan that I see online, and it sickens me. The amount of racist, classist, misogynistic, and transphobic crap they have to put up with is not okay. It will never be okay.
Here’s a Daily Mail article from a couple of days ago (now deleted), saying that Harry volunteered in “the hood” because it was in Meghan’s old neighbourhood in LA:
Here is the Daily Mail (also now-deleted), saying that Meghan is “(almost) straight outta Compton”. The paper is trying to paint Meghan as having come from a “rough” “Black” neighbourhood, even though she did not live in Compton (she was raised in nice suburbs of Los Angeles), her father was an Emmy-winner working in the TV industry, and her mother is an educated and accomplished social worker:
Here is Princess Michael of Kent wearing a racist blackamoor brooch to Meghan’s first Christmas lunch at Buckingham Palace (as Harry’s fiancee) in 2017:
Blackamoor is an “European art style from the Early Modern period depicting highly stylized figures, usually African males but sometimes other non-European peoples, in subservient or exoticized form.” So it’s an old, super racist brooch depicting a Black servant.
That was what Meghan had to deal with at the first Christmas lunch with her new family. How would you feel?
This is how anti-Sussex social media accounts talk about Meghan:
It goes on and on.
Let me be clear: all of this type of commentary is vile. It’s unacceptable. I don’t know what else to say about it. I’m sorry that Harry and Meghan have to deal with this garbage. /fin
