Tweet Follow @RPJblog
By Jason Michael
The Royals are having a wedding, hurrah! But there are a few flies in the ointment. The bride-to-be is less than Kate-perfect. She’s Catholic. She’s maybe even Jewish. And by Jove ‘she’s come in the wrong colour.’
Viz was right. Back in the summer of 2016 the British satirical magazine correctly predicted a royal wedding would be used to smokescreen Brexit the minute the majority of the population woke up to the stupidity of leaving the European Union. Here we are at the tail end of 2017, the profound idiocy of the direction Britain is taking has dawned on everyone save for the seriously intellectually challenged, and… you guessed it, the royals have made an announcement. Congratulations! Harry Hewitt has found a woman daft enough to risk her sexual health by marrying him. But there’s a twist to this happy-ever-after nonsense. Meghan Markle, an American actress, according to the right-wing British establishment press, “isn’t the one for Harry.”
So bad a match this is in fact that the “unlawfully killed” Diana Spencer, Harry’s mum, took a brief break from sainthood in heaven to inform the British public through the medium of the Express newspaper that she was a dirty. Let’s face it; everyone knows she’s not perfect for the Saxe-Coburg und Gotha family, but no one has wanted to put their finger on the real reason – she’s black. Well, that’s only part of it. She’s a Catholic – an Irish Catholic, and USA Today hinted at her having some Jewish in the mix.
Holy shit! A black (or “bi-racial”) Catholic Jewess sitting down for Christmas dinner with Sieg-heiling Liz and the bigoted auld swine Phil, can you imagine? The racism, antisemitism, and anti-Catholic sectarian bigotry of the recently styled Windsor-Mountbatten’s is no secret, and this blow-in is about to set the cat among the pigeons.
Her Jewishness, to be fair, is in question. When USA Today ran with the story Reuven Rivlin, the President of the State of Israel, eager no doubt to boast of a Jewish connection to the British monarchy, leapt for his phone and invited the happy couple to honeymoon in the Promised Land. The Jerusalem Post, ever the killjoy of Israel’s aspirations, managed to lob some treyf on the wedding cake. The Daily Express – not known for its accuracy – reported that a spokesperson from Westminster Abbey had said Ms Markle’s “Jewish background would not prevent her from having an ‘interfaith’ marriage there.” Duncan Jeffery, head of communications at the Abbey, however, informed The Jerusalem Post that no one from the Abbey mentioned her Jewishness, adding this was “merely conjecture on the part of other people.”
She is Catholic though, and she is definitely African American – black. One of those issues can be, and is being, sorted. Meghan Markle is a Catholic. Her two-times Emmy Award winning father Tom is a bhoy, an Irish-American Roman Catholic, and she did the whole Catholic school thing. There’s no doubt about it – she’s definitely a Taig. But that can be washed off her, and quite actually – with the magic of holy baptism. Her soon-to-be grandmother-in-law has insisted Markle’s religion be corrected before she walks down the aisle – for the second time.
This is a problem too, and one that cuts right to the heart of the bigotry in the family she is marrying into. From the early 1970s the Anglican-Roman Catholic International Commission (ARCIC), an ongoing interfaith dialogue between the two churches, accepted the shared Christian baptism of the Anglican Communion (an ecclesiastical community of which the Church of England is a member) and the Church. That Markle is now to be re-baptised suggests the Church of England no longer accepts the shared Christianity of the Catholic Church. There is, admittedly, the possibility she was never baptised in the first place. She is described as a “non-practising Catholic.” I was unable to get her on the phone. Still, it stinks of the whole Catholics not being good enough thing typical of the British establishment.
What baptism can’t wash away is her colour. The Spectator attempted to make the case she was “unsuitable” for the “same reason that Wallis Simpson was unsuitable.” Simpson was not unsuitable on account of her cosy relationship with Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party. That has never been a problem for the British monarchy. What got on the royals’ goat was that she was ‘sloppy seconds’ – she was a divorcée.
Of course this is absurd. The imbecile lined up to be crowned next, the man we are led to believe is Harry’s father, was divorced and remarried. The advent of modern news media has made it next to impossible for royals to have the sorts of indiscretions that made them notorious in times past. Now divorce in the family is – like Brexit – all the way back to Henry VIII. What The Spectator was trying to say – albeit in a roundabout way – is that she’s unsuitable, she’s black. Catholic is one thing, but she can be moved from the Rock of St Peter to the bollocks of King Henry, but no one can square the circle of the woman’s skin colour.
Having said all this, I have nothing against the poor creature. I wish her well – she needs it. She can do much better for herself. She’s about to marry the royal dud. This is wee Harry the hero who went to war for the cameras, who honoured his brothers and sisters in arms by wearing a Nazi uniform, and who has a thing for class-A narcotics and hired affection. He’s a shite example of a human being, but then the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. But yeah, “she’s unsuitable.”
Colorism and Global Standards of Beauty | Chika Okoro
Random Public Journal 