Prince Harry of England and his mixed-race American wife have had a baby and the question the Los Angeles Times is asking is, “Will Meghan Markle and Prince Harry raise their baby to be black?”
Now you’re probably thinking: “Oh, Andrew Klavan, you’re such a funny, satirical sort of guy, you always make me laugh out loud, and you’re so good-looking too.” And normally, I would agree with you. But no, this time, it isn’t just me trying to make American journalists sound so race-obsessed they’re like some left-over Nazi lunatic raving in his padded cell about the bloodline of a baby who is seventh in line to a throne with no power in a country the size of Oregon. This is a real headline on an op-ed written by Carla Hall, who is actually on the L.A. Times editorial board.
Carla writes – and these are all real quotes, “Baby Sussex, as he’s called for the moment… needs to know about what it means to be a black person in the world today. Of course… there is no one black experience — except, perhaps, a cop stopping you because you look like a suspect.”
And yes, it will be interesting to see Baby Sussex pulled over by a cop who asks, “Hey, black guy, where did you get that motorcade?”
Over at CNN, John Blake asks, “How black will the royal baby be?” “There are questions about how to racially define the royal baby,” John writes in the passive voice because no one is actually asking such questions. He goes on to say, “Left unsaid is something no one has seriously suggested: Why not call the baby white? Why? Because much of the talk about the baby’s racial identity has echoes of the one-drop rule from slavery and the Jim Crow era.”
So life is going to be tough on Baby Sussex. Not real life. Life in the news media. Which has nothing to do with real life.