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Will trolls ever take a day off?
By Alice Kelly — Written on Jun 07, 2021
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s baby girl is just a few days old but she has already become the victim of online trolling and racially charged mocking.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex welcomed their second child, Lilibet Diana Mountbatten-Windsor, whose name pays homage to her great-grandmother, Queen Elizabeth II, and her late grandmother, Princess Diana.
But the touching tribute wasn’t enough to stop one reporter from making a mockery of the newborn, her racial identity, and her parents’ social justice efforts.
What did a reporter say to mock Meghan and Harry’s infant daughter’s name?
“What a missed opportunity. They could have called it Georgina Floydina!” wrote Julie Burchill, a British journalist and Markle critic, in a now-deleted tweet.
Burchill is, perhaps, best known for a libel case in which she was ordered to pay damages to Ash Sarkar after accusing the activist of being “an Islamist, a hypocrite and worshipping a pedophile,” on social media.
The comment presumably refers to George Floyd who was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin in Minneapolis last year.
Markle was vocal in her criticism of police killings and her support for the Black Lives Matter movement in the weeks following Floyd’s death.
Burchill’s tweet appeared to make a bizarre mockery out of Markle’s condemnation of Floyd’s murder.
Making an utterly irrelevant link between the racial killing of a Black man and the birth of a mixed-race child reflects an ongoing discomfort with Blackness in the media.
Shocked social media users also took issue with Burchill’s language in referring to the newborn as “it.”
Her language dehumanizes the baby before appearing to mock her racial identity as if to declare Lilibet somehow less than human and therefore open to ridicule.
Burchill doubled down on this choice, saying it was "a nod to non-binary bollocks."
The Sussexes have repeatedly made a case to criticize the British media for the racist attitudes towards Markle and their firstborn son, Archie. Prominent media figures — we’re looking at you Piers Morgan — have repeatedly attempted to deny and justify their attacks on Markle and defended themselves from accusations of racism.
However, comments like those made by Burchill speak for themselves.
Everything that Prince Harry and Markle say pushed them to move away from Britain rages on without them, even after the couple shone a new light on racism in the U.K.
Meghan Markle and her children are often targets of racism.
At the time of Archie’s birth, a British broadcaster was fired after tweeting an image of a couple holding hands with a chimpanzee with the caption: "Royal Baby leaves hospital.”
The grotesque comparison pointed to a long, racist history of comparing Black people to apes, a practice that has been historically used to justify slavery, anti-Black violence, and has even trickled into modern media representations of Black people.
Even within the Royal family, racism played a role in the Sussexes departure. The couple alleged that concern was raised over Archie’s skin color even before he was born.
The barrage of racist comments directed at both Markle and her children reflects deep-seated racism that impacts Black people even at the highest social strata.
At this point, the couple’s every move is so viciously criticized that it would have been less surprising if there had been a less abhorrent reaction to the baby’s birth.
Their repeated attempts to call attention to the mental health impacts of online trolling and racism are labeled as attention-seeking and selfish.
So, it’s no wonder that critics will find a way to drag down even the happiest of news about the couple.
However, regardless of what your feelings are about the couple, these undertones of racism create a hostile environment for people of color across Britain whose chance at meaningful, diverse representation in the Royal family has been repeatedly tarnished by anti-Blackness.
Alice Kelly is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. Catch her covering all things social justice, news, and entertainment. Keep up with her Twitter for more.