United Kingdom: When a prince utters racial slurs

last updated 8 January 2015

Yasmin Alibhai-Brown

The Independent

Prince Harry has put his foot in it again, said Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. In a video made three years ago that just came to light, Harry—21 at the time and attending military school—refers to a fellow cadet as a “Paki” and tells another cadet his sun veil made him look like a “raghead.” Both are racist epithets. The incident is proving as embarrassing for the royal family as the 2005 escapade in which Harry showed up at a costume party dressed as a Nazi. Maybe it runs in the family. Harry’s grandfather, Prince Philip, often makes “what are affectionately known as ‘racist gaffes’—as if he just forgot that it is not nice to call oriental people ‘slitty-eyed’ or to say that Romanians breed to fill their too many orphanages.” Apologists say Philip must be excused because he is old, while Harry should get a pass because he is young. It’s true that it’s harder these days to determine what is acceptable lingo. Many in the YouTube generation say that we are now in a “post-PC” era when everyone says “Paki,” with or without irony, so what’s the fuss? But it is different when a prince, who is supposed to set an example, uses such a term—especially in the army, which is trying to overcome a “deeply embedded culture of racism.”