On Monday, Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, whose marriage last year brought a historic change to Britain’s royal family, welcomed a son, the first interracial baby in the monarchy’s recent history.
Seventh in line to the British throne, behind Prince Harry, it is unclear whether the child will receive a royal title as a result of the circumstances surrounding his birth, like those bestowed on the three children of Prince William, Harry’s older brother, and William’s wife, Catherine.
However, the baby is certain to be the object of uncommon astonishment, adored and also criticized as a mark of the modernization of Britain’s royal family.
The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry, 34, and the former Meghan Markle, 37, have surprisingly shaken up the royal family in a lot of ways: Having a gospel choir featured in their wedding which held last May, a freestyling African-American pastor and a pool of Hollywood stars.
They continued to ignore convention even after the wedding, opening their own Instagram account and also offering little access to the royal-obsessed British news media. They announced in April, that they were canceling the traditional photo shoot right outside the Lindo Wing at St. Mary’s Hospital in London, curtailing the ritual hullabaloo that typically surrounds royal births.
The Sussexes have simply successfully become another front in the British culture wars, like the vegan sausage roll, or Brexit.
For a lot of people, the newest addition to the royal family’s importance will be indelibly linked with race.
Britain is made of 87 percent white, but researchers have found that interracial children make up its fastest-growing ethnic category, and will very soon be the country’s largest minority group. The entry of Meghan Markle, the descendant of plantation slaves, into the royal family could be related by many people of African descent, who almost immediately began to anticipate the birth of the couple’s first child.
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