Queen Elizabeth with couple in the making – Prince Harry and African-American actress he just announced engagement with
They might appear on the surface to be about matters of the heart or the proclivity of rich boys and girls but, in truth, they are about the complexity of identity in the world to come and how the black race fits into it if the signs are anything to go by. Prince Harry is scheduled to marry Meghan Markle, an American actress but whose mother is African-American. Although the father is a white, racial comments have greeted the engagement. So, here is a situation where the British royal family have no problem with marriage across race but not the ordinary Britons working the traditional and social media, those the prince is blasting for racial and sexist comments on his marital plan. Does it then mean that even in the post modern age, some people are still so insecure they must seek security in racism? Is that to say that human beings cannot transcend identity borderlines even when there are no evidence for such borderlines?
19 year-old Obama’s daughter and the 19 year old son of a British investment banker, all at Harvard
On the other hand of the story is 19 year old Malia Obama who has just entered Harvard University whose white boyfriend is the subject of felt let down among the blacks. That is those thinking she should have been befriending an African American like herself instead of the white son of a British investment banker. Although no one can say Malia is a gold digger and neither is the boy in question, critics have found race as the biting point. So, both whites and blacks suffer from racial inferiority, each for different reasons.
What all these suggest is that identity in the postmodern world is still going to be as complicated as it is now: ethnicity/race, religion, region, gender and so on. That is to say that, although, there is so much meeting and mixing, the old borderlines are still with us. Or is the observable racism here the resistance of a dying order?
