No More Mindless Mourning
When Buckingham Palace announced the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Sept. 8, the U.K. entered a 10 day period of mourning in which many of its functions were halted. The 10th day, the queen’s funeral, was recognized as a national holiday causing food banks, supermarkets and National Health Service appointments to shut down on short notice (National Broadcasting Company). However, in the wake of the queen’s death, it must be noted that her reign was marked by frequent, inhumane violence against the people of Britain’s colonial territories and that many communities were directly harmed by her policies. Those who pointed out this fact online were met with vitriol. For people to expect others to mourn a monarch who caused immense suffering is unreasonable and absurd.
The atrocities committed by the British monarchy throughout history continued under Queen Elizabeth’s rule. When Elizabeth became queen in 1953, the British Commonwealth consisted of over 70 territories, and many of them were treated horridly. The Mau Mau movement in the early 1950s—the militant resistance to British control in Kenya—was brutally put down (The Guardian). While the BBC reports that 32 white settlers were killed in the conflict, the Kenya Human Rights Commission says that 90,000 Kenyans were killed or tortured. The treatment of the Kenyans was not an isolated incident. In the late 1950s and into the 1960s, resistance in Cyprus and Yemen against British control led to detainment and murder of native inhabitants (Encyclopedia Britannica). Unquestionably racist actions occurred during her reign as well. The Guardian reports that until the late 1960s, “colored immigrants or foreigners” were not allowed to serve in clerical roles in the royal household. More recently, Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex and the first non-white person to marry into the royal family, revealed that racism felt from other royals was the driving factor behind her and Prince Harry’s decision to leave Britain (TIME).
It is understandable that many people felt no sorrow over the queen’s death. Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Dr. Uju Anya, whose native Nigeria was decimated by a civil war exacerbated by Britain, tweeted that the British monarchy was a “thieving raping genocidal empire” and wished that the queen’s pain “be excruciating.” However, instead of receiving sympathy for her family’s trauma, she was met by intense backlash. Jeff Bezos posted a belittling tweet responding to hers, which amassed over 70,000 likes and hordes of people subsequently sent her racist and threatening messages. Rather than defending their faculty member, CMU distanced themselves from and condemned Anya’s comments. That Bezos contributed to the hate directed toward Anya and that CMU enabled it is despicable.
The root of this behavior is that too often, the British monarchy is romanticized as a pinnacle of elegance and luxury. There is a certain irony in the vast amount of royal Crown Jewels originally taken from Britain’s former overseas territories. Since artifacts of brutal imperialism are flaunted as royal status symbols and displayed as objects of pride, it is unsurprising that people feel no remorse for wishing the queen a painful death. When a ridiculous expectation to celebrate monarchical structures is indiscriminately imposed upon people, those who suffered directly from Queen Elizabeth’s reign should be allowed to mourn their personal losses—the loss of family, of generational wealth and of culture. People must remove their lens of societal fascination with inherited wealth and status to better comprehend the violent repercussions of British dominance over the world.
