It’s been all over the news for the past 10 days — after two years, we’ve finally been able to discover who exactly were the alleged “royal racists,” who expressed “concerns” over “how dark” the skin color of Prince Harry and Meghan’s firstborn child, Archie, might be.
The subsequent uproar was, if not surprising, then certainly loud and boisterous, with every journalistic voice imaginable clamoring for the central spot from which to call out the guilty parties by standing them on a figurative Foucauldian medieval scaffold for all to see, and publicly punishing them with millions of globally pointed virtual fingers backed by knowing, self-righteous smirks.
Because this is what a racist deserves — we must out the slimy demon and brutally exterminate it as thoroughly as possible, not only because of its atrocity, but especially for the sake of protecting our own pristine commitments to social justice and equality. As soon as the demon is routed out and made visible, it must be crushed with the quickest, most vehement efficacy, because there is no safe harbor for such a monstrosity in the world, and we all roundly denounce it in unquestioned support of that collective agreement.
But that is also too often the problem — that racist demon is too often not visible. It is deftly hiding in the dark cracks and crannies of the minds of millions, in places that we cannot see, in places even inside ourselves that sometimes we don’t even know exist, and would be shocked and mortified to realize. As long as it can be invisible, deeply hidden from prying eyes, it is secure, like all abhorrent things that seek the shelter of darkness, returning to the light only with great care, only when absolute safety is assured, or else with a violent, unrecognized and unexpected suddenness that is disavowed only with great difficulty. Sadly, it exists, and even the most innocent among us have not and cannot escape being, and having been, touched by it. From this perspective, “concerns” can mean many things to many people. But there is no time to think in any instance of public accusation where race is involved even in the slightest way, as we must hurry to cancel lest we be somehow discovered and canceled ourselves.
This is its power — that no one can actually see into the mind of another. We can only assume what is there through external proofs, like behavior, actions, expressed beliefs, certain kinds of silence, the language we use and how we use it. As a result, “concern”— a word with many disparate significations, from care or worry to interest, can be taken in any one of those ways. In the collective repudiation by which the media frenzy about the “royal racists” may be described, what may be the actual truth of its intended meaning — which only those directly involved can truly know — we can turn it into anything, especially if we need to bury our fears and satisfy ourselves that at least we are on the right side of things where race is at issue. And we must not forget — incitement of that public dread also drives clicks.
Especially in America, where interracial marriage used to be against the law, racial questions such as this still pinch a deeply embedded cultural nerve. The director Rebecca Hall’s difficulty in bringing her 2021 film “Passing” (based on a 1929 novel by the Harlem Renaissance author Nella Larsen) to fruition is a case in point. In the novel, however, there is a moment where one of its heroines, Clare Kendry, is having tea in her home with two old friends whom she hasn’t seen for years. The reason for that distance is unusual — all three can pass for white, yet Clare alone decided to actually cross the color line and do it, having married a bigoted white man who knows nothing of her origins.
The three friends are discussing the deeply silenced fact of race in terms of having children. Clare describes her terror throughout her pregnancy at the possibility of having a “dark” child, and that this was so intense she would never risk it again, while her friend Gertrude, whose white husband knows of her heritage, mirrors that fear, saying that they “don’t know like we do, how it might go way back and turn out dark no matter what color the father and mother are.” Clare then sums it up by responding, “It’s awful the way it skips generations and then pops out.”
Regarding the “royal racists,” what if those “generations” are all, or at least mostly, white, and for hundreds of years? In such a situation, how would one know anything at all about any like issues of color? In these circumstances, couldn’t “concern” also represent just simple curiosity? Precisely because of this kind of lack of knowledge, especially in the face of my own mixed-race heritage (unrecognized in America because both parents are Black and my skin color isn’t light enough to pass), as well as my family of many different colors, white to dark, in my personal situation I took the unasked question into my own hands. Given my French husband’s solely Breton roots, I thought it might be a good thing for him to know that any baby could be on a scale from dark, brown to very, very pale, if not actually white.
Simple curiosity doesn’t immediately make for rabid racism. But we have no chance of ever being able to come to such a conclusion if panic precludes thought. What exactly is it that we fear?
Cyraina Johnson-Roullier is associate professor of modern literature and literature of the Americas at the University of Notre Dame.
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