It is interesting to see how totally different the general attitudes of the US press and the American people were from that of the British public in their reactions towards the dramatic revelations by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex in their two-hour bombshell interview with Oprah Winfrey last Sunday. In the ensuring days, America reacted with widespread anger at Buckingham Palace for allegedly “perpetuating falsehoods” against Meghan and her insinuation of royal racism. Serena Williams, the US tennis star, said she was a victim of “systematic oppression” and added that she knew “first-hand the sexism and racism institutions and the media use to vilify women and people of color to minimize us.” Amanda Gorman, the young black poet who delivered her poem at Joe Biden’s inauguration, said: “Meghan was the Crown’s greatest opportunity for change, regeneration, and reconciliation in a new era […] They didn’t just maltreat her light – they missed out on it.” President Joe Biden praised the Duchess of Sussex’s “courage” in a statement issued by the White House, whilst Hillary Clinton, the former presidential nominee, commended the Sussexes for “standing up for themselves and their young children,” and issued a call to action for the royal family to “be more dynamic and forward-looking than they currently are.”

By the sound of it, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s narrative seems to have been taken in completely by the ostensibly gullible American public – some say this may partly have to do with the American psyche of portraying England as a land of bigoted snobs and xenophobes whose accent is found spoken by villains in most American films. The portrayal of the royal family by the Sussexes in the interview was not exactly flattering – being referred to as “the Firm” by Her Grace the Duchess, the royal family was characterized as an anachronistic, oppressive, medieval, dark syndicate tantamount to Blofeld’s Spectre from which the guileless duchess from the west coast had, as luck would have it, escaped, along with her prince, who, after having unwittingly spent thirty odd years trapped in the system, had finally come to his senses and bravely embark on a new life in Santa Barbara.

For those who are familiar with the rules and customs of the British monarchy, the interview would come across as dishonest and intentionally deceitful. The Duchess insinuated that her son Archie was denied his birthright of the title of “prince” and the style “His Royal Highness” because he is not white, and she was upset at the “idea of the first member of color in this family not being titled in the same way that other grandchildren would be”. This cannot be further from the truth. Her son, Lord Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, Earl of Dumbarton, is a great-grandson of the monarch, and as such is not a prince from birth, just like other great-grandchildren of the Queen. The rules about who gets to be a prince and also be referred to as “His Royal Highness” (HRH) come from a letter patent issued by King George V in November 1917, in which it was declared that the great-grandchildren of the monarch would no longer be princes or princesses, except for the eldest son of the eldest son of the Prince of Wales (heir apparent); the children and grandchildren of a sovereign have the automatic right to the title HRH and prince or princess, and as such, Archie will be entitled to the titles when Prince Charles accedes the throne. The Duchess was clearly aware of the protocol: she referred in the interview to a “George V or George VI convention” that would mean her son Archie would become a prince “when Harry’s dad becomes king”; her allegation of racism on the part of the royal family against her son only hinges on that she had been told the protocols would be changed so that Archie would be excluded from becoming an HRH and prince. The fact, however, is that this was actually a reference to the Prince of Wales’s stated wish for a slimmed down monarchy and has nothing to do with racism.

The inconsistencies on the part of the Duchess that were demonstrated in the interview were also astonishing. At first she was unfussed about titles and honorifics, a few minutes into the interview she was “upset” that her son might not be a prince; she claimed that the reason she wanted her son to be granted the title of “prince” was that as a prince, Archie would be entitled to police protection paid for by British taxpayers. The fact, however, is that minor royals such as Princess Anne, Prince Edward and Sophie are guarded only on official duties and engagements, and, by her own admission, she had actually written to the Queen to say that she did not care about protection.

The most damaging allegation yet against the royal family came in the form of a race slur, in which the Duchess claimed that someone in the royal family had speculated about what color the Sussexes’ baby would be. A speculation on a certain physical characteristic of an unborn child is itself neutral, in the sense that it is a prediction on a matter of fact and carries no moral connotation per se. The speculation on the part of an unnamed royal family member on the color of the Sussexes’ baby can only be as racist as people conceive it to be: if the Duke and Duchess of Sussex were really as color-blind as they claim themselves to be, they surely would not have taken offence at a possibly neutral speculation on a certain physical attribute of their unborn baby, just as people would have no issue with some innocent speculations on a baby’s eye or hair color.

What is despicable about this slur is that neither the Duchess nor the Prince had substantiated their allegation; it is an insinuation inasmuch as Oprah Winfrey elaborated it in the form of a question: “If they were concerned that if he were too brown, that that would be a problem?” To which the Duchess skilfully replied: “If that’s the assumption you are making, I think that feels like a pretty safe one.” The “allegation” of racism, by the Duchess’s own admission, was an “assumption” at best. And it wasn’t even something that the royal family could possibly refute or own up to: by withholding the name of the royal family member who allegedly made the remark, what the Sussexes did was effectively denied the royal family of a fair chance to present a defence. Someone in the family might have said it, but who said it is beside the point: rather than identifying that a specific member of the royal family is a racist, the Sussexes’ intention was to portray the whole family as a racist institution. Even if – for argument’s sake – it was a complete fabrication on the part of the Sussexes, the royal family would have no way to refute the allegation, for it would amount to a logical impossibility called the Devil’s Proof – while evidence will prove the existence of something, the lack of evidence fails to disprove it.

The main message that the Sussexes wanted to convey with the interview was that they were forced out of a racist and anachronistic country by a racist and anachronistic royal family in which they were inadvertently trapped. Whilst it remains to be put to proof that the royal family as a whole is an irretrievably racist institution which the Sussexes would like the outside world to think (the British royal family is also the royal family of 15 other Commonwealth realms, the majority of which are countries with large Afro-Caribbean populations), Britain is a country that prides itself on being one of the most open, pluralist, and multicultural societies in Europe, if not the world. This is a country in which one in ten MPs in the House of Commons is non-white; two of the four great offices of the state, i.e., Chancellor of the Exchequer and the Home Secretary, are held by members of the ethnic minorities, and two of the most senior members of the cabinet, i.e., Dominic Raab, Priti Patel, are descendants of refugees. The Sussexes might want to trash their family and their country out of desperation to win favor with their celebrity peers in the west coast and reincarnate as leaders of the new international woke elite, the truth is, and will remain, our country’s best defence.

(Joseph Long is a London-based writer and linguist from Hong Kong.)

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