A White Guy, Glorified for Rejecting Racism

by Phyllis Chesler

In the beginning, I just felt sorry for poor Harry; clearly, he was so lost, still so much Diana’s traumatized boy. Then, slowly, I grew uncomfortable. Why did he have to keep rubbing, touching, holding hands with Meghan in public? Was he her child? Soon enough, I lost interest in the ho-hum revelations, the ridiculously well-funded documentaries and the Tell-Alls, so very monotonous. I did not respect how Prince Harold, (that’s what his brother calls him), used the media to turn on his family, but neat trick that—using the very medium that once hounded his mother. Also, he’d be even closer, nearly equal to Meghan in terms of breaking with their fathers and with a sibling. But now, I suddenly realized what another, killer, sub-plot was about all along.

A weak white guy has renounced his royal and allegedly racist family for a bi-racial woman and for the California life of an…actress. He’s thrown in his lot with Meghan, some of whose ancestors were formerly colonized and persecuted, and he has actually chosen a former colony of England—that’s America—to live in. And Harry’s done so while America is in the midst, at least culturally, of another kind of revolution about racism.

We’ve been toppling statues of white Civil-war era southern generals, removing the names of former slaveholders or known racists from university walls, renaming sports teams with arguably racist names. We’ve seen university students forced to deal with racism and “gender” most of the time, and newspapers increasingly covering racism as a subject and featuring only or mainly artists, singers, actors, painters, authors, etc. of color. (True, to be fair, they were missing in action all those years that mainly white folk dominated the same pages).

So Diana’s Harry has taken a stand against White Power, White Royal Power. Is he prepared to really make this his principled life’s work—or has he just stepped off a dangerous ledge?