So, did you watch it? Of course you did. Saturday was a momentous day in this great nation’s history. It was ‘The Wedding of the Year’, the joining together of the playful prince and the ghetto princess who is “(almost) straight outta Compton“, the woman who will bring “rich and exotic DNA” to the “watery, thin blue blood” of the Windsor family. And it was glorious. The black preacher and black choir and black mother who managed to look elegant despite being a ‘dreadlocked, African-American lady from the wrong side of the tracks’ (Sorry mate, you’ve reached your daily quota of Daily Mail links -Ed). The one thing that we can all agree on is that this wedding signalled the end of racism in Britain, just as Obama’s two terms did for America.
Hold on, I’m going to add a picture that has absolutely no connection to the last sentence whatsoever:
I want to publically echo the congratulations given by councillor Simon Dudley to the royal couple. Oh sorry. That link must be broken. It links to an article that details how Dudley called for the removal of the homeless before the royal wedding. Try this one.
Oh dear. This is rather embarrassing. This link has redirected to how Windrush migrants are still sleeping rough. But how can that be? I mean, obviously there’s no link between the stories. Lets move on.
Distressingly, there are some who are not seeing this wedding for the rather obvious panacea that it is. Take David Lammy, MP for Tottenham who said:
“Clearly one wedding isn’t going to fundamentally alter the lives of Britain’s ethnic minorities, many of whom are still subject to different forms of discrimination”.
Spoilsport.
Or take old misery guts Natalie Morris, who said on the BBC that:
“I think it is important not to overstate the impact that this interracial marriage can have. I know the symbolism of it is important, but really it is just tokenism at its worst to imply that one brown face within this overbearingly white institution can make any impactful change to how we approach race relations in this country…I think, at best, naïve and at worst damaging”.
How does she not see that this marriage is the cure to societies racial ills? We have precedent for goodness sakes. The Williams sisters ended racism in tennis , Tiger Woods ended it golf, there is none in football (this site would like to humbly apologise at the number of seemingly broken links on today’s post – Ed), and, most importantly, Obama ended all racism in America.
This may be difficult to believe, but I am a secret optimist, willing to believe the best in people in all situations. I should have been delighted at the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. I was not. I stayed up late into the night, texting (for our younger readers, that’s like Snapchat for old people – Ed) with my unicorn buddies, and the strangest thing happened when Obama’s victory was announced: we were all sad for the same difficult to define reason. We immediately resorted to gallows humour, saying things like, ‘This is the fulfilling of King Junior’s dream’ and ‘Yes!!! We’ve made it!’ We were deeply uneasy at the prospect of an Obama presidency. We innately knew that his election would be like a Disney film. How? Well do you notice that the classic Disney films normally end at the ‘happily ever after’ moment? Snow White marries the prince, whilst the evil witch dies; Ariel marries the prince and is reconciled with her family; Quasimodo is accepted into society and is the hero of the story, just like the source material. We don’t normally see what happens two, four or eight years down the road.
Let me be clear. Two people falling in love and making a vow to love each other is great. Anything that makes people in community feel camaraderie is fine. But what is most assuredly not fine is saying that a single wedding is going to heal this country. I wonder if Balvin Marshall, a 64 year old man who has been homeless since 2011 following the Border Agency deciding he wasn’t British enough, felt healed on Saturday. He doesn’t stay around the Windsor area, which is a good thing. We need to get rid of the likes of him from the streets of Windsor so we can look at a wedding that shows us that racism in this country is over.
I don’t have the words to explain why the royal wedding doesn’t end racism in this country, but I know a woman who does, and she would say:
I know the symbolism of it is important, but really it is just tokenism at its worst to imply that one brown face within this overbearingly white institution can make any impactful change to how we approach race relations in this country…I think, at best, naïve and at worst damaging”.
The Black Unicorn 