Was racism present in the royal family BEFORE Meghan?!

[Inspecto]

Was racism present in the British Royal Family before Meghan arrived on the scene?

It matters to know the history because we all know how the royal family like to hold on to their traditions and are generally not fond of change.

The fact we think Meghan is the first person of colour in the royal family’s history goes some way to demonstrate the point… because she is not the first non-white.

The Little-Known History Behind the People of Color Who Joined the Royal Family Long Before Meghan (time.com/5946375/people-of-color-royal-family-victorian-era/)

The royals and racism — before Meghan and Harry

Buckingham Palace banned ethnic minorities from office roles, papers reveal

Why do you think the British Royal Family press teams might want us to forget that true history? Shouldn’t it instead be celebrated that there were people of colour in the royal family before Meghan? Why is the history hidden? What happened to the non-white royals who came and went before Meghan?

They shouldn't need a deterrent not to be racist... or want to get away with it

that they have little reason to change the same as most racists?

I'm still really not clear on what your post is driving at unless you are Anita Anand and you're trying to promote your podcast.

Root Causes of Racism

I am trying to understand why the royal family might be racist.

What are the root causes? Is there a history of racism in the royal family that we don’t know about? How has that history played out?

It matters because history helps predict the future.

If the history shows there was racism, but it was silenced and buried and then everyone forgot and carried on, then what’s to say that can’t happen again? The racism might by a cycle that needs to be broken.

Most white people are racist. It is instrinsically woven into every aspect of everything. The Royal Family are no exception.

The racism might by a cycle that needs to be broken.

You reckon? I agree. But I think your sources are a bit off, give this a go

2 of them are dead and the other incidents are basically due to ignorance and being unaware of the significance. The painting has hung there for decades and is probably no more that wallpaper. Totally agree they all need shaking up and educating but I wouldn't say they are any worse. I'm sure the Meghan issue has made them look to address issues just as a similar incident would make an institution look at its ideas. The police and fire brigade and army etc have all needed a wake up call

Thanks for the book recommendation.

Nobody of colour has married into my family. Does that make us racist. Your logic is ridiculous

The royal family might not be an exception, but their status and public profile means that they set a public example.

And does that make families from India and Jamaica who have exclusively non white partners also racist. Living in the Uk that is. I know plenty of families like this

This might boil down to the general root causes of racism?

www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/root-causes-of-racism/

@username8888 Do you really think we only condemn racism within the Royal Family?
Although it is a bit whataboutery. Maybe start a thread elsewhere about other people's racism?

I can comment wherever I like.

Inspecto, assuming that the Duleep Singh sisters wanted to marry men is another form of bias. Catherine had a relationship with Lina Schafer for many years until her death, wouldn't leave her during WW2, risking danger, and was buried next to her. Anita Anand mentioned this in her bio of Sophia. It's true that she might have wanted to marry, but the evidence on her points to at least bisexuality. Her and her sisters' chances probably were curtailed by their ethnicity.

I agree that Sophia and Catherine Duleep Singh's achievements should be more well-known (I got interested in the suffragettes and heard about Sophia in several books but Catherine wasn't mentioned), and that it's good that people like the Duleep Singhs and Sarah Forbes Bonetta are being recognised. But like pps, I doubt that Queen V' and the other royals' attitude to them was that enlightened (there was a docu about Duleep Singh a while ago and apparently he was told he couldn't go back to India and Queen V told his English aristocrat wife, possibly the first to marry a person of a different ethnicity, not to have children with him, which she didn't).

The question itself is nonsensical.

If they don't like Meghan because she's Meghan, then its not racism, and couldn't have existed before they met her.

If they don't like her because she's black, then it's racist and it's always been there.

Racism is intrinsic - you generally don't switch it on or off depending on the person.....

People who think only white people are racist in the modern sense of favouring white people for housing etc are very naive. The truth is any race or culture which has the upper hand will be racist to the less favoured members of society. If you want to see reversal, go to South Africa where the whites are now the hated minority. Arguing that they shouldn't be there and that they had their time oppressing the natural population, simply proves what I am saying, if you agree that they deserve to be oppressed?

It's ingrained in human beings from the Stone Age to fear and discriminate against people who look different. Whereas nowadays we don't wish to annihilate different peoples, we have an inbuilt ability to judge others and this includes racism, misogyny and disablism.

Talking about the slave trade is just a distraction. Human beings have enslaved other humans since someone thought it was a good idea. Africans enslaved other tribes, and when the white people came along, they enslaved other Africans to sell. Is there an evidence of white sailors 'scouting' in remote African villages for slaves?

To say the royal family built their wealth on slaves is a massive over simplification and quite ridiculous. The whole country including the RF built their wealth on trade, a small but significant part of which included slavery. So you think it wasn't slavery to put children into mills to weave cotton? We were also the first to ban slavery and policed the seas capturing slave ships and setting the slaves free. Focusing on history is directing energy away from what really needs tackling in society as a whole, which is inequality. Sadly racism, misogyny and other ills of society will probably always exist, all anyone can do is raise awareness and try not to fall into the trap of 'othering'.

“Catherine had a relationship with Lina Schafer for many years until her death, wouldn't leave her during WW2, risking danger, and was buried next to her.”

Did she have a romantic relationship with Lina or were they just best of friends?! I’ve heard and read conflicting views on the nature of relationship because it was never confirmed either way.

Sophia. It's true that she might have wanted to marry, but the evidence on her points to at least bisexuality. Her and her sisters' chances probably were curtailed by their ethnicity.

What’s the evidence that points to her at least being bisexual?

In a documentary, Anita Anand says that Sophia’s suffragette work came at great personal cost because she never had a family of her own: “she was too brown for a white man and too white for a brown man.”

It’s also difficult to workout how much is conjecture.

But like pps, I doubt that Queen V' and the other royals' attitude to them was that enlightened (there was a docu about Duleep Singh a while ago and apparently he was told he couldn't go back to India and Queen V told his English aristocrat wife, possibly the first to marry a person of a different ethnicity, not to have children with him, which she didn't)

But I don’t think that was just about ethnicity. Anita’s book suggests a longer term strategy to ensure there were no more Duleep Singh’s to challenge for the Punjab throne. So sounds more like Queen V’s greed and selfishness, with a racism added to the mix.

@beatrice14 ”Inspecto, assuming that the Duleep Singh sisters wanted to marry men is another form of bias.”

Bamba seemed to want to marry a man (she sent Sophia drawings of potential suitors!) and eventually did but was much older by then. Seems clear she faced great difficulties finding a man who would commit to marriage.

The Duleep Singh sisters were, like all royals past and present, aware of their line of succession. Carrying on their blood line would have needed a man, even if they didn’t fancy men per se.

Victoria made sure Maharaja Ranjit Singh had no descendants

I wonder if the idea that “maybe they didn’t want a man because they prefer women” was also a good way to explain away their struggles to find suitable marriage partners and have children?

I think you may have misread my post - I said that the evidence points to Catherine being at least bisexual.

I would say that 2 women living together all their lives in an emotionally intimate relationship with an extremely strong bond and being buried next to each other (Anand says in the book that they were 'besotted' with each other and that Catherine's 'intense relationship' with Lina was 'the only thing that mattered to her') is extremely strong evidence that it may have been sexual too. In any case, I would define it as definitely a Boston marriage/romantic friendship. By 'lesbian' I didn't necessarily mean it was sexual - a relationship can be romantic without being sexual, otherwise asexual people wouldn't able to have romantic relationships, which they can.

www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sex-sexuality-and-romance/202008/loving-someone-without-sexual-desire

@beatrice14 ”and was buried next to her”

I see no evidence of her being buried next to Lina. From what a recall from Anita’s book, Catherine died in England and was cremated. No one knows what Bamba did with Catherine and Sophia’s ashes.

I agree with your point about needing succession - but did any of them actually mention this? Living with Lina appeared to be the bigger priority for Catherine.

When the princess died she left a will dated 1935 in which she stated "I, Princess Catherine Hilda Duleep Singh desire to be cremated and the ashes buried at Elveden in Suffolk. In a codicil she had also requested that a quarter of her ashes be "buried as near as possible to the coffin of my friend Fräulein Lina Schäfer at the Principal Cemetery at Kassel in Germany". Wikipedia linked to the V and A website, but the page was down.

It is in many sources that that “the British had resolved that only the extinction of the Duleep Singh family line could secure their long-term control over the Punjab. Queen Victoria even instructed the wife of the Maharajah’s eldest son not to have children. Family members were convinced that the cooks at Elveden were British spies and adding poisons to their food to make them infertile. Curiously, none of Duleep Singh’s eight children had any offspring.”

After the death of both parents and the instability that their deaths brought, it sounds like Lina offered Catherine some stability and safety, especially if Catherine had any belief that she was infertile and couldn’t have children even if she wanted to.

Thanks I hadn’t seen that before. But she states “friend” and nothing more.

Clearly, Catherine and Lina were close. But we don’t exactly know the nature of their relationship because we were not party to it.
Wasn’t Lina her teacher or governess? Could it be more of a protective mother-child like bond?

She couldn't really have put 'lover' or 'wife' etc.. there wasn't really the language, whether it was sexual or not, and it would have caused scandal to hint. Her family didn't mind the relationship, but I suspect that if it wasn't platonic, Catherine and Lina wouldn't have made it obvious.
Many women who were in lesbian sexual relationships still referred to their sexual partner as 'friend', for several reasons. For example, Romaine Brooks and Natalie Clifford Barney's relationship was definitely sexual, but in a letter Romaine referred to Natalie's other lover as 'gnawing at the very foundation of our friendship'.
And not just women - Oscar Wilde, who was as everyone knows Alfred Douglas's lover, repeatedly refers to their 'friendship' in 'De Profundis', and says that any sexual interpretation of their relationship is not 'the right one', his letter to Douglas in prison, which could be because he thought the prison guards would read it.
There could have been a maternal element too- Catherine had known Lina since she was fifteen.

Perhaps, but the Duleep Singh family was being made extinct, so Catherine also had nothing to lose by saying more than “friend” in her dying will.

I am sceptical when people jump to conclusions about other peoples’ relationships and assume ‘romance’ because it can say more about people wanting there to be a romantic relationship rather than the truth of whether or not there was one. We all like juicy stories and that sells, but that doesn’t mean it’s always true.

It sounded more likely to be a maternal relationship to me. Catherine was only 15 when she met Lina, and it was following the death of both Catherine’s parents too.