It’s a Girl, But is it Black?

by Vijaya Chandrasoma

President Biden has completed 50 days of his Presidency in a style as different from that of his predecessor as night and day. And he has performed magnificently, in the backdrop of the worst health and economic crises ever faced by the nation.

Amazingly, a crisis of regal proportions has overwhelmed the world’s headlines. A scandal that has driven media attention of the most terrible crises faced by the world to obscurity. A cataclysm that will change our lives forever.

Will the unborn child who is destined to be eighth in line for the British monarchy be black? This is the burning question which raises any number of new and unanswered questions.

Archie, the firstborn of Meghan and Prince Harry, will have a little sister according to the latest news breaks. When is the due date? This vital information has not been revealed for reasons of national security, but her bump seems suspiciously prominent. The adoring public needs to know.

The recent Oprah interview, which brought this controversy into the spotlight, highlighted most dramatic allegations in the interview made by Prince Harry and Meghan. Why was their firstborn, Archie, denied a royal title? Was it because of his skin color? Which, incidentally is alabaster white. Archie is now plain Archie Mountbatten-Windsor, while the children of Harry’s elder brother, William are Prince George, Princess Charlotte and Prince Louis. Seems unfair, definitely not cricket, old boy. However, according to a decree made by a long dead King, only the children of the first in the line of succession are entitled to royal titles. But Prince William is not the first in line, Prince Charles is.

Having a colored Monarch is anathema to all the finest traditions of the ancient House of Windsor. Archie got lucky. He was born with a white skin, to the envy and relief of his white subjects. But what if the child on the way has a DNA throwback to an African, and turn out to be a black baby! At Buckingham Palace, for God’s sake.

All these rules and traditions got to be so confusing, even to the British, that Queen Elizabeth II created in 2004, by Royal Warrant, no less, the Roll of the Peerage, a public record of the relative levels of aristocracy in the United Kingdom. The Roll is maintained by the Crown office within the British Department of Justice, and published by the College of Arms. The Roll, in its devotion by the British, is second only to the Bible.

A system of aristocracy headed by a monarch, treats with contempt the efforts of other, sadly tradition-free countries,Vicky to experiment with various methods of government. Like Democracy in the USA until 2016; the Marxism of early 20th century Russia; the Principle of Ethnic and Religious Purity, most famously in the Germany of the 1930s and proliferating throughout the world; the disaster of dynastic, criminal autocracy, again in the USA from 2016 to 2020, which is being emulated, with similar consequences, in much of the Third World, including our beautiful Sri Lanka. All these systems of governance are either dead or terminal while the successful and eminently just system of the British Monarchy has endured, indeed flourished, for centuries.

The complex rules of racial classification in American traditions have always confused me. My understanding is that if you are 1/64th black, if your great, great, great grandfather was black, then you are black, however white your skin color is. You and your future generations will, as the saying goes, always “have a touch of the tar brush”.

Look at Meghan. She has the beautiful skin tone and features of a tanned European woman. But when she fills a job application in the USA, she ticks the box that says Black. And now that Harry and Meghan have shed the most aristocratic shackles of the British monarchy and are private citizens, so will Archie and his future sibling. How the mighty have fallen!

Maybe the perfect opportunity for a budding author to script a modern sequel to Mark Twain’s classic, The Prince and the Pauper.

We have the ultimate examples of this racial confusion. President Obama’s father was a Kenyan, but his mother and his grandparents who had an important role in raising him were Kansas white. Obama was never known as half-white, he was always our first Black president. And so with our current Vice President, Kamala Harris. Her father was from Jamaica, a black man from the West Indies. Her mother, who single-handedly raised Kamala and her sister, Maya, was born in Madras. VP Harris always talks about the Indian traditions that had been instilled into her when she was growing up. But she will always be our first Black Vice President.

The abiding rule is that If you are not 100% white, then you are black. How these 100% white people figure out to a certainty who their ancestors slept with is a secret they will take to their graves. A secret that fosters and strengthens their belief in White Supremacy.

Trying to figure out if the British monarchy is racist, because a technically black child not yet born should have a royal title is hardly a difficult – or material – question. A colored British Prince? How revolting. Imagine a colored man being Britain’s Tory government’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, or worse, the captain of the English cricket team. Or the Catholic unthinkable -an African Pope. Almost as unthinkable as Jesus being a Jew from the Middle East, whose natives are not famed for blonde hair and blue eyes.

The Times They Are A-Changin’, as the Bob Dylan song goes.

The current British Chancellor of the Exchequer, Rishi Sunak, is colored, of Indian origin, as is Home Secretary, Priti Patel.

A man born in Madras, Nasser Hussain, led the English cricket team from 1999 to 2003. He is also an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE).

And there have been three African Popes, though all before 500 A.D. What makes this fact interesting is that the ethnicity of these Popes was hidden from common knowledge, “because over the years, artists created images of them with European features”.

Racism has endured since the beginning of the great religions. The British monarchy is just carrying on these traditions. The great wonder is how the monarchy of an Empire on which the sun never set, whose rule was based entirely on white supremacy, has commanded, enthralled and earned the devotion and admiration of the world.

Now to the less important, inner page news of the comparatively insignificant crises facing America and the world.

President Biden has been working day and night tackling the twin crises of Covid 19 and the resultant economic depression. The progress he has made in containing the virus, in committing to guidelines recommended by scientists and getting the pharmaceuticals to accelerate the speed of production and distribution; and actually getting the vaccine into the arms of sometimes reluctant people, is nothing short of spectacular. The epidemiologists predict that a sufficient number of Americans will be vaccinated to reach herd immunity by the end of the Summer. The rescue stimulus package which he has now guided through a hostile, though minority Senate will be yet another shot in the arm for desperate Americans and the economy.

He has delegated the less desperate problem to his able and diverse cabinet, most of whom have now been approved by the Senate. He has also left the investigations into the numerous crimes committed by the Trump administration to the Department of Justice.

The Washington DC Attorney General is conducting an independent investigation into the insurrection of January 6, including Trump’s probable involvement/incitement. Over 300 Trump supporters have already been arrested; many have told the prosecutors that they sought to violently overturn the November election because Trump told them that the election was stolen, the Big Lie.

Georgia prosecutors are presently investigating into the telephone call of over one-hour Trump made to the Secretary of State of Georgia, Brad Raffensperger, threatening him that he (Raffensperger) would be committing a felony, if he didn’t doctor the Georgia election to “find” 11,780 votes (existing only in Trump’s delusions) and give him a fraudulent win in that state – a demand that the Republican Raffensperger rejected out of hand. A similar threat emerged last week that Trump made a recorded telephone call to Frances Warren, chief investigator of Georgia elections, pleading with her to subvert the election, saying “she would be praised” if “the right answer comes out”. The Georgia Secretary of State told Trump, very politely, to go to hell: “I can assure you that our team (the Georgia Bureau of Investigation) is only interested in the truth and finding information based on facts”. The Wall Street Journal has a recording of this conversation, which has been released to the media.

This is the integrity, the independence and the incorruptibility of public officials which has withstood the efforts of would-be dictators, auto and plutocrats and crooks to destroy American democracy; through slavery, Reconstruction, Jim Crow laws of apartheid and the violence of today. Through a racist president who placed his knee on American democracy, not for eight minutes, but for four years.

The integrity, the independence and the incorruptibility of the bureaucracy of Sri Lanka in the post-independence 1950s, was ruthlessly and unscrupulously politicized, manipulated and finally destroyed by the aforementioned Sri Lankan brand of politicians and crooks. This has transformed a beautiful, abundant, thriving island to the dire, corrupt, economic and administrative straits of today – in just over 70 years.

There are other major crises facing America and the world today, according to historian Jared Diamond, “we currently have four global crises to address: the ongoing threat of nuclear attacks, climate change, running out of resources and socio-economic inequality”.

These petty crises may engage the attention of lesser mortals, but we devotees of the British monarchy reserve our concerns to the color of an unborn child.