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TIMES ARE CHANGING: The birth of royal baby Archie Harrison is already sparking race debates

IAN WRIGHT didn’t get it wrong when he declared in a recent video that Archie, the new royal baby, has changed the race relations game in the UK for ever.

I mean, the kid’s just over a week old and already he’s got the whole country wondering what colour he is and whether he’ll be able to ‘pass’ for white or not.

Wrighty was commenting on his mate Danny Baker’s ‘mon- keygate’ comparison of the new royal baby to a chimp in a suit. The fallout from that not only saw Baker lose his job at BBC Radio 5 Live, but also suffer the outrage and disgust of every single fair-minded person in these here British Isles.

Once upon a time, Baker would have gotten away with it. Enough people would have laughed along with the ‘chirpy cockney’ at any suggestion that you couldn’t tell the difference between a black man and a monkey in a circus.

It was the kind of thing that the northern (black) comedian Charlie Williams made his name on when I was in my early teens. Later, when I went to live in Los Angeles, I discovered that black Brits were not the only ones who had suffered in silence at the insinuation that we were somehow only four fifths of a human being or at the very least, for polite society’s consumption, less intelligent than white folk (the view of the acclaimed psychologist Hans Eysenck, whose nonsense in the book Race, Intelligence and Education is still legitimised by so-called academics, without being dismissed for the pseu- do-scienti c racist rubbish that it is).

That, regrettably, is the black condition in a nutshell – we are de ned by others, our in- telligence is assessed by others and our thoughts are controlled by others. How are our thoughts controlled, you ask?

INNOCENTLY

Like I say, I went to live in Los Angeles, only to discover that what black folks there were thinking wasn’t one million miles away from what black folks in Britain were thinking. It was Roxanne, a receptionist at the newspaper I worked for, that asked me, almost innocently: “Did they show that old series Planet of the Apes in the UK?”

I’ll be honest, I knew what was coming next. There was no other reason to bring it up if it wasn’t in reference to the black condition. After all, this was 20 years after the television series starring Roddy McDowall as Galen, and the franchise had, as yet, not been rebooted into the mega movies that it has now.

“I think Hollywood made that series on purpose to make black people feel bad,” Roxanne, who was straight outta Compton, added.

I knew where she was coming from, because I am from that generation who watched Planet of the Apes on the telly on a Saturday night, only to be pulled aside by one of my white classmates on a Monday morning to be told that they had watched my ‘family’ on the telly on Saturday night (yes, that’s right, so primitive were the conversations about race at the time – let’s not forget that).

Look, I believe in a good conspiracy theory. For real. But Roxanne’s one had one major aw – the primates in the series were the smart ones. Still, that is no reason to be comparing a black person to a mon- key, even as a joke.

Interesting though, that last week’s outrage was about Her Majesty the Queen’s great-grandson who happens to have African heritage.

The outrage asserts quite clearly that the level of abuse that his mother has had to suffer since she married into the royal family will not be tolerated for the child. At least not for now.

Perhaps it’s because, unlike his mother, the royal bloodline courses through his veins. But the outrage also acknowledges that Archie is black (or as some people have been saying on social media, “mixed race”, a term that many of us naively believed would somehow protect him from being included in the “black people/monkey” abuse, but apparently not). And that is the most interesting factor here.

Because the tendency will be to think of Archie, as he grows up, as only a quarter black and in effect white, in a world where blackness is now more judged by the colour of your skin than the one drop which once upon a time denoted you for unfair treatment.
So will Archie be able to ‘pass’ for white or not?

Ironically, it may be the racists that will decide that, for they will keep reminding us that Archie is in fact black, no matter what colour he is, because they won’t be able to resist the sly insinuations – you know what racists are like.

If Archie wants to be their baby, it really does matter if his mother is black or white. As far as racists are concerned, Archie will never be mixed race let alone white, because they (racists) stick to the one drop rule. In that respect, Archie is our little man in the royal family.

You know what we’re like – even if you only have one drop of African blood in you, as far as we’re concerned, you’re black and we’ll embrace you as a member of our diasporic family.

I hope Archie realises that. I hope he doesn’t shirk from his African heritage. I hope that’s at the forefront of everything he does and becomes. Not because we need him, but because he needs us for those times when the racists get on his back with their chants and other monkey business.

We, Harry’s extended family, will be here to catch him, pick him up, dust him down and get him to start all over again, as we are for all people of African heritage who are subjected to racism. Because we know what it feels like. And we know the racists will not let him be.

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