I Can See

Prince Harry's voice hasn't been heard. It's been ignored. I ignored it. In an interview that's only gotten a little attention from 2021, we hear Harry's voice. I wouldn't have given it a second thought unless a friend had advised me to give it a hearing. 

We think we've heard enough of Harry especially since his Grandma died but really it's our own bias and envy we're hearing. The media can claim a share of the blame for how Harry and Meghan have been labeled as antagonists. The media loves victims but it loves culprits just as much. We ask ourselves, "How can a half-Black White girl from Cali be loyal to the Royal Family when she can't even be loyal to one race?"

It's the media's business model to create and destroy people. It's our choice to buy in or not. We usually fashion our opinions on whatever the trend is, that is, whoever is on top. I think it's a myth that public opinion favors underdogs. The public likes winners but it also likes to watch people fall. I thought Prince Harry had fallen. I was wrong. He's risen.

I think we put too much blame on the media for Harry's smeared reputation. The media has pretty much remained neutral in the family fight. The media didn't have to take sides in this case. The sides were already delineated. "Look what Harry has done to his family, " is what we think. “What a spoiled brat.” The media had nothing to do with creating that construct.

Most of the blame for our deafness to Harry's plight is within us White males. There's still that tincture of prejudice when we see an interracial couple that causes the hair on the back of our Caucasian necks to tingle. Not so much if we see a White woman with a Black man. We know what we call her. And as for the Black man we say, "Well, he's got his trophy."

If we'd had been in Paris in 1945, we'd be the first to shave the heads of collaborationists. Interracial marriage is viewed by some people in all races as a sort of collaboration. There's something about a White man with an other-than-White woman. Whites feel betrayed.

I didn't hear Harry's voice. I didn't listen to his words. Perhaps it was my own bias against class, caste, and privilege that were my obstacles that prevented me from giving him a bit of my precious time to listen to him. Like James Connolly said in 1910, every class in society except British royalty "has contributed something to the moral, intellectual or material improvement of mankind." Now that I have seen a reflection of my own experience in Harry's experience, not a theoretical or hypothetical experience but a lived experience, I would have to say to Connolly that there is one royal who has contributed something, Prince Harry.

Harry's words, his confession, makes me ask, "Who is more worthy to be King? The first son or the second son? Who has suffered the most for his people?" Harry is a man who lost his mother to White Privilege and a man who almost lost his wife to it. That he lost title, privilege, and fortune doesn't seem to bother him.

Harry elegantly and with candor has given voice to White male angst. He has a masterful command of rhetoric to be able to speak elegantly with candor. Elegance implies a feminine delicacy and candor implies masculine rigor. It's difficult to bring both together and make it sound natural. It's instinctual. He must have inherited that gene from his mother. It would be as difficult for him to break through the veil of amber jelly that has been his lens from birth as it would be for a commoner like me to look through my own lens that makes me want to say, "How could someone who has so much be so ungrateful and for what, a mixed race gal from California?" Poor judgement.

I am sure that is exactly what my family, my aunts and uncles, and neighbors and family friends thought when I walked away from a lucrative business and surrendered my East Fallowfield, landed-gentry identity to marry my wife from Puerto Rico. "Well, Richie has always been a little strange. Too smart for his own good. No common sense."

Harry's story reminds me so much of what happened when I married out of my race. Harry's family didn't give him what he needed emotionally. My family didn't give us what we needed emotionally. Reassurance. We didn’t need a red carpet but we didn't need the family to ask me to give back the key to the house that I had had since sixth grade. My family took away and even though Harry renounced, in reality, whatever he thought was due him was taken before he had time to denounce it. His due was taken the second he married out of his race.

Maria and I married in 1988. By 1993 I was out of the business. I loved the nursery business. I used to walk the fields and look at those trees as if they were my children. Why not? It was my foot that shovel-broke the soil and my hands that tucked them in the dirt. It took years to withdraw and recover. It was my wife who filled the void. She made me a man.

We became estranged from my family. We stopped going to "the house." Stopped going to their picnics. Stopped going to Holiday dinners. Stopped celebrating birthdays with them. My mother delivered Christmas presents like an UPS delivery driver. She had no time to open gifts with the kids. She had just enough time to smoke a cigarette and be back on the road. We had stopped swimming in the pool because they restricted our use. They wanted to be sure I didn't bring any Puerto Ricans except my wife and stepdaughter.

Between 1993 and 2013, I doubt if I spoke 100 words to my father and when I did he would focus on watching the TV, pasting stamps in his collection, or gazing out the window into the corn field. Even on his death bed, when he had very little body energy left, I said to him, "Dad I forgive you." He mustered enough to lift the side of his mouth as if snarling. He died in silence with me at the side of his bed. Silent.

I had become an anathema to my father. He could forgive my sister marrying a Catholic but not me for marrying someone with a lesser White pedigree. Race was the red line in the sand. I crossed it.

Don't cry for me. It's the best thing that ever happened to me. It removed what the Hindus call the Veil of Maya. My experience not only showed me what I shouldn't believe but it also showed me how people can make other people believe in illusions; illusions handed down from family, friends, and country.

My experience also gave me a greater faith. It taught me how to honor my mother and father and at the same time proved to me that a man must be the head of his own household [Gen. 2:24]; not the head of the household in terms of domination but in terms of placing someone else before everything as God has ordained it. It is the wife who comes even before the parents and the husband must exemplify the moral character of his home. That might mean rejecting the moral character of his parents' home.

‎Wednesday, ‎September ‎14, ‎2022

Source

The Me You Can't See: Prince Harry on Meghan Markle [TV series episode]. (2021, May 17). In O. Winfrey & P. Harry (Executive Producers), The Me You Can't See. Apple TV+.

I want to thank Ms. Laurie Shannon-Bailey for sharing this video with me and inspiring this essay.