“When we cheer the royals, democracy suffers. What a retrograde moment”, The Guardian
Suzanne Moore, Opinion, 22 May 2018
Meghan Markle brings glamour to the royals, and they benefit enormously, but Broken Britain can’t be patched together by pageantry and a kiss.
Afriend texts from the US: “Is the monarchy safe for another 100 years now?” Yes, I tell him, I think it is. Saturday was a sunny day and we were brought a vision of ourselves as open, inclusive, free of politicians, full of celebs and horses; this was balm itself. The two people at the centre of it all radiated love, there was a gospel choir and a preacher, and a single mother sitting all alone with immense dignity. I was happy for them.
Meghan is a self–declared feminist, while Harry is a besotted prince. Thus the institution renews itself and there is a mood of self-congratulation. Look at us! We are not a mean-spirited, racist country, because we have let a little bit of the “other” into our theme-park monarchy. This is symbolically important: a woman does not have to be white to get her prince. The fairytale opens the door and in slips the wondrous Meghan.
Will the door stay ajar? Will she be assimilated into the firm? Her life will be absolutely controlled from now on.
Harry’s mother did not declare herself a feminist, but she tore up the script that said Charles could have a mistress; that her children would be sent away; that she must not complain; that she was simply to breed in captivity. Diana’s self–dramatising made her disruptive, a genuine agent of change. Meghan is an actor and a social justice warrior and how she plays these roles is crucial as we face the prospect of an old and unpopular king inheriting the throne. The Daily Mail is already warning her to remain “politically neutral”, ie don’t say anything too challenging. Kate Middleton is middle England’s blandprincess and Meghan will be expected to be just as compliant.
The euphemism for her dual heritage is “modern”. Somehow, in a country that is riven with discord about who should and should not be here, blackness gets reconfigured as modernity, rather than being recognised as part of our history.
As the homeless were cleared off the streets of Windsor to make way for the well-wishers – who then listened to a sermon about making poverty history – one has to ask for whom interracial marriage is a big deal. It is the establishment and the liberal middle classes who continually lecture the working classes on racism and yet it is at the bottom of society, not the top, that interracial relationships are so common as to not be remarked upon. It is the establishment that locks out black people. David Lammy called it “social apartheid” when discussing the astonishing fact that 13 Oxford colleges did not make a single offer to black A-level applicants over a six-year period.
The assimilation of Meghan will be worth watching. If Broken Britain looked mended for a day – patched together by pageantry and a kiss – there has to be acknowledgement that the narrative around identity, sovereignty and nationhood is a place of conflict. The writer and critic Raymond Williams spoke of how new cultural meanings and practices emerge and thus the dominant culture changes. Everything is in flux, except around the monarchy, whose meaning Williams rightly called archaic, for this is a feudal affair. Its role is to show us the limits of capitalist democracy.
So this is not about whether Meghan is great or not (she seems pretty great) or whether the wedding was nice or not (it was). It is about whether this symbolic moment can sustain itself, whether emergent oppositional meanings around feminism or diversity can solidify. She brings modernity to the firm and they benefit enormously. They suddenly appear to be in a class of their own, superior to the dreary politicians.
When we cheer them for welcoming this extraordinary woman, we are also cheering the opposite of the system that provides us so few moments of happiness: democracy.
I wish her well but, my God, what an unreal, retrograde place to be.