Harry: The Interview

I want to talk about Prince Harry. I know, not very unique, the whole internet seems to want to talk about Prince Harry.

But first, I’d like to tell you about me. My name is Brianna, I am a mixed race Black woman of Nigerian and Irish heritage. I was raised by my Mum and her family, a white Irish family. I love my family, but I’ve also spoken before on here about the struggles I have had being raised as a black child in a white family. The fight I have to get them - one member in particular - to acknowledge their unconscious bias, to acknowledge that the society that raised them is far from perfect and means they can and do say, and do, racist things even unintentionally, it’s arduous and exhausting.

I say all this to provide context for my next statement. I believe every word that Prince Harry said about his family. I have seen exactly what he describes play out in real time. I’m sure up and down this country there will be people of colour raised in white homes that recognise the defiance, the hostility, the gaslighting of “it’s all in your head.” I’m sure there may well even be people like Harry, white people, who fell in love with people of colour and had their eyes opened to the depths of their families shortcomings around race. The sad truth is, what he describes is not uncommon.

I believe him. It’s interesting to me though that so many people don’t. I was of course not in the room with Harry when any of these incidents occurred, I have no proof to back up my belief in him, I have nothing other than my own experiences. It’s interesting to me that people with no personal experience or connection to what’s being described, and who also weren’t in the room with him, are so steadfast in their refutation of what he’s said.

#HarryIsATraitor. #HarryIsALiar. #HarryIsALyingTraitor. All of them trending on twitter. Filled to the brim with impassioned tweets from people who so strongly believe Harry has fabricated all of this. His grievances with his family? Lies. His grievances with the institution he was born into? Lies. His grievances with the tabloid press? Total lies. There’s no version of reality for them where Harry is in the right.

It’s interesting because there seems to be a total disconnect between tabloid press and consumer, and Harry and the rest of the public. Because I sit here and I can see even today the tabloid press have done exactly what he says they do. They took his words and they twisted them to tell their own narrative. Headlines making out that Harry called Camilla a villain, as if that’s his current opinion and he was dragging her through the mud. The consumers jumping on it, and using that as fuel for their Harry Hate Train.

The truth of course, for those who have seen his interview with CNN is that Harry was talking about Camilla’s public image in the aftermath of the Charles and Diana wedding breakdown, and his mother’s death. She was seen as the villain, and he went on to say she needed to rehabilitate her image. He was giving historical context to decisions made by Camilla to make deals with the British press. They’d improve her image with the stories they printed about her, if she helped them sell copies by leaking stories on other members of the family. Anyone who was around in the early 2000s shouldn’t in any way be surprised by this. And yet grown adults seem so easily to forget the countries feeling to Camilla in the years following Princess Diana’s death.

From the outside, as a member of the public who doesn’t pick up a tabloid, it seems so obvious. It’s hard to imagine how Harry is still having to fight this, is still having to fight to be believed. We know the tabloid media does this. We know. The tweets claiming his mother would be ashamed of him again seem to forget that the exact system he is so desperately trying to change, stole his mother from him. They took her in life, and they took her in death. They dehumanised her, they commodified her. She was not a person, she was simply to be consumed. Devoured. A source of entertainment for the public’s consumption, and a big payday for those selling and printing the pictures and stories.

And it killed her. They hounded her until tragedy. More recently we saw the same thing happen with Caroline Flack. Her worst moment laid bare on the front of a tabloid paper, sold by a police officer. The story was fabricated to fit their narrative, faux-journalists like Dan Wootton made it their mission to destroy her. Breaking her down was the new sure fire way to cash in, they did not care what the consequences were. And of course we know the consequence was Caroline’s life. And with it, a piece of every person who loved her. And now, 3 years on, those exact same people spend every day hounding Meghan, hounding Harry, defaming them, spreading vitriol. And the consumer eats it up. That is fine. That is allowed. That is truth.

But if Harry speak on his story, he’s the problem? If Harry speaks on his experiences, he’s the liar? The gossip mags and their various sources are truth tellers, but the word straight from the horses mouth cannot be trusted?

27 years ago Diana sat down with Martin Bashir and spoke her truth, sick of it being twisted and contorted and told by everyone other than her. And now we look back and praise her. How brave she was, to stand against an institution that had caused her so much pain. Good for her for speaking up for herself. But now we vilify her son for doing the same? For following the example set by his mother, desperately trying to stop history repeating itself.

But there’s another side of this too. Because it’s not just those blinded by consumerism, or nationalism who want to condemn Harry. Twitter was also full of people from the Black community saying he’s not doing enough.

“Unconscious bias comes under the banner of racism too tho lol, why is Harry trying to separate the two??” read one tweet by user theashrb. “Defending Susan Hussey was needless and undermines a lot of what Harry is claiming to stand for lol.” reads another from Jason Okundaye.

There’s so much to unpack here. I’ll start with the expectation of perfection. No one is. And no one is going to get everything right. And no one is going to step out and be the perfect racial activist because it doesn’t exist. And if it did exist, it certainly wouldn’t be coming from a 38 year old white man, raised in the epicentre of British legacy - which we know is rooted in Empire, which is rooted in colonialism, which is rooted in racism - who experienced a level of white privilege almost no one else on Earth ever will. If we’re talking about the way in which society creates unconscious bias, he is at the very top of it. He has more unlearning to do than most, and to expect perfection and condemn his mistakes doesn’t reflect badly on him. It reflects badly on you. Because here is a man at the top of the social hierarchy, who is truly trying. To learn, to grow, to make change, and apparently that’s still not enough.

Second, the unconscious bias vs racism comments. This is one where opinion differs. Me, I am of the opinion that racism - or homophobia, or transphobia, or misogyny etc - has to be intentional. By that I mean, you have to know what you’re doing is not okay, is rude, is hurtful, is oppressive. And there are some that are obvious - slurs for example - that if you engage in, we’re not wasting time on unconscious bias. It was a racist act. However, there are so many things that are racially insensitive that people may not know the context around, to even think it’s a problem. Unconscious bias, literally by definition, is something you are not conscious of. If you engage in a racially insensitive behaviour because you were not conscious it was insensitive, that is a mistake. If I then tell you about it, your reaction is what moves us from mistake to racism. Because either you care about causing racial offence or you don’t, and your reaction tells us which one applies. Comments about what a baby are going to look like aren’t unusual in a family, and we weren’t there so we don’t know, but perhaps Harry believes that’s the context for the comments about Archie. Not wilful racism, but a racially insensitive comment, borne of their own unconscious bias.

And maybe it wasn’t. Like I say, I wasn’t there, I don’t know. And neither do you. But what I can say is this. Perhaps this is something you learn as a mixed race person, that monoracial people do not ever have to learn. But knowing someone is racist intellectually, and knowing someone is racist emotionally are two different things when that person is your family. For the majority of us, family is at the heart of us. And racism is a big deal. We don’t want to believe that someone who lives at the heart of us is wilfully racist. And so even if we take unconscious bias and racism to be the same thing, mentally you want to look for ways to see that your family can change. That they aren’t bad people. And I think that’s what Harry has done. If he calls it unconscious bias, he can rationalise room for change, room for growth. If he calls it racism, to him that may well feel like saying he thinks his family are bad people. I think we see him do this in other ways too. There’s the establishment or institution, and then there’s his family. One he condemns, the other he loves deeply and wants reconciliation with.

It’s easy to stand on the outside and point fingers and pick sides and place expectations. To want him to say more, to say less, to say it all, to say nothing. To say he’s doing too much, to say he’s doing not enough. But it seems to me that not enough people are remembering that this is just a man. This is a man who watched the world, the tabloid media, the institution, devour his mother until there was nothing left. Who at 12 years old was so deeply traumatised by her loss that for 11 years he truly believed she was still alive and in hiding away from it all. Even in his grief it made sense to him that she’d want to be away from it all. This is a man who has lived his entire life under the microscope of public scrutiny - and the psychological effects of fame is something I could write pages on, but it’s not something any human being is built to sustain. He is a man, with his own story, who are we to tell him not to tell it? Or that it’s wrong? Or that it’s not what we wanted to hear? This is a man. Just a man. He cannot be everything you want him to be - whether that is hero or villain.