Minorities need better policing and healthcare. What they get is a discussion about the hurt feelings of the rich and famous
You probably won’t remember this, considering everything that followed, but when Harry and Meghan got married, there was a popular view in the media that their union was a watershed moment for British race relations. The wedding, we were told, cast a spell on black, white and mixed-race people alike, enchanted by the nods to Meghan’s Afro-American cultural heritage during the ceremony. “A new era dawns,” a New York Times headline read. “Modern” was a word often used to describe the pair. A modern wedding, for a modern couple, in a modern Britain.
This new era did not dawn. But the prophecies of it are useful to revisit, because they should remind us that it didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. Because the country that Harry and Meghan married in was one that, just a few months before their wedding, declared Paulette Wilson, who had lived in Britain for 50 years, “removable to Jamaica” and detained her in Yarl’s Wood. The Windrush scandal was also “modern” Britain.
The diversity and inclusion struggles of rich, famous people say little about the country as a whole outside the lives of those rich, famous people. But even though they are tiny in number, they are gigantic in influence. Their ability to amplify their grievances means that we plot the racial history of this country via the journeys of its least relevant protagonists, such as princes and Hollywood actors. These figures inhabit such a different universe that not even their publicists are grounded enough to tell them that complaining in a Netflix documentary that the ceilings of their temporary palace cottage were too low is not something they should be attempting to solicit sympathy for.
Nesrine Malik is a Guardian columnist
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
