Member-only story

If They Can’t Stop Fighting, Maybe It’s Because They Don’t Want To

Prince Harry’s comments about the royals and the tabloids reveal a lot about the nature of symbiotic relationships.

Jelani Greenidge
9 min readMar 10, 2021
Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex, sharing their story with Oprah Winfrey

So even though I don’t generally have much emotionally invested in the royal family or whatnot, I — like many of you — found Oprah’s interview with Meghan and Harry to be quite riveting.

Which surprised me, because the broad outlines of the story are, to me, not particularly surprising. If there’s one story I keep seeing played out over and over in the last decade or so, it’s Traditional White Institution Tries to Welcome Token Person of Color and Fails Badly. I wouldn’t be shocked if news reporters kept a basic template for these stories and just changed the names, locations and organizations, Mad-Libs style… it’s happened in churches, nonprofits, in government and in the private sector. For some of us people of color, it is literally the story of our lives.

So yes, I felt compassion for Meghan and Harry, but I was not surprised that another White led institution had an opportunity to change and instead chose the path of rigid traditionalism … and is now scrambling to do damage control.

This story may be technically newsworthy, but at its center, it’s not a new…

--

--

Jelani Greenidge
Jelani Greenidge

Written by Jelani Greenidge

Pastor, Writer, Musician, DJ, Stand-up Comic. Author of Undercover Prophets. Linktr.ee/jelani.greenidge Support via Cash App $JelaniGreenidge He/Him

No responses yet