Could there be any more anti-diversity notion than a Royal Family? They go beyond skin color. You either have the blood or you don’t to be part of the club.
But who would want to be part of a club that is anti-inclusion, anti-diversity, and utterly offensive. That’s why as the world watched Queen Elizabeth II’s pompous funeral on Monday, I just kept thinking about the deodorizing effect a modern monarch has after several centuries of evil ruled by violence.
At one point more than a third of the world’s land mass and 700 million people were under the British Empire. You don’t reach that zenith simply by applying the queen’s notion of love and service.
Emil Guillermo
It takes force and might, and a roaring sense of white supremacy. You’ll recall Rudyard Kipling’s “white man’s burden,” often used as moral justification for empire, because who but the white man could civilize the black and the brown people of the world? And so Britain entered Africa and Asia in places like Kenya, Hong Kong, Burma, and India.
The Brits were even in the Philippines, for a brief time, occupying Manila from 1762-1764. Maybe they couldn’t find decent bangers and mash? They left in a hurry as the Philippines were already colonized by Spain, then ultimately America, which colonized the Philippines after the Philippine-U.S. War.
For more on the impacts of British colonialism, I hope more people get to know the work of Harvard Professor Caroline Elkins.
