Spare

What Prince Harry's Memoir Tells Us about How Whiteness Operates in Families

I took a day to read Spare, the new memoir by Prince Harry (ghost written by J.R. Moehringer). It’s one of those breezy, celebrity memoirs that is, even at 410 pages, a quick read. I had fun with some of the British vocabulary like trews for trousers, or biro for pen (which I had to look up to get the joke about getting a biro as a gift from Princess Margaret). Most regrettably, I also learned the meaning of todger, in a section that goes on far too long. (I imagine the ghost writer asking, “tell me about your most embarrassing moment?” and H offering up the frostbitten todger story.)

There are a handful of revelations that haven’t been mentioned in the Sussex’s extensive PR campaign: Princess Diana had a waterbed when the boys were young; Meghan didn’t know who Prince Andrew was and mistook him for an assistant to the Queen. I’m not a dedicated royal-watcher but I there is something in Harry’s story — of someone who lost their mother much too young and his fumbling attempts to break family cycles — that speaks to me.

There are also some takeaways from the book that tell another story, perhaps a different one than he intended.

While the stated goal of Spare is to provide the public with “Harry’s story” of growing up, losing his mother, meeting and marrying Meghan, leaving England and stepping away from the monarchy, and it does all of this, I think there’s a subtext about whiteness. About how it operates in families, how integral sadomasochism is to maintaining it, and how vicious the response is when someone within that system tries to break out of it.

I’ve written about Princess Diana and the way that her image, especially post-divorce, was circulated worldwide as an emblem of white ‘angelic’ motherhood. (See, also, Raka Shome’s excellent, Diana and Beyond, which informed this analysis.) Whiteness is central to Harry and Meghan’s story, too.

That the British monarchy and the tabloid press were sent into convulsions because Harry chose to marry a “biracial woman with a Black mother,” as he described her in a recent interview, is the tell. It’s not simply that she was an American, a working actor, and a non-royal outsider (who, it is revealed, Willy and Kate found “rude,” for her Americanisms), it was that she was Black, and that was seen as a threat to the established (white) order of things. Harry seems to have realized this first when the first, ugly tabloid headlines appeared (“Straight Outta Compton”). He doesn’t discuss it in the book, but in their sit down with Oprah, Harry and Meghan talked about the concern in his family about “how dark (Archie’s) skin might be when he was born.” Apparently, the royal family is still into the one-drop rule.

While Harry has been transformed by his relationship with Meghan and by the way this relationship has surfaced the racism in his family (“unconscious bias” is the language he uses), he is still very much a white male descendant of the British monarchy. He acknowledges his role in killing (at least) 25 people in Afghanistan and this is framed in terms of “service.” Little is said about how these people and their families might have suffered because of this. All’s well in the service of the British Empire it seems.

Here, he comes so close to getting it but then veers away from a crucial insight:

“Not just a diamond, actually; the Great Diamond of the World, a 105-carat monster called the Koh-i-Noor. Largest diamond ever seen by human eyes. ‘Acquired’ by the British Empire at its zenith. Stolen, some thought.”

Ooh, keep going Harry, you’re almost there. The people of India would like a word.

The book spends much more time on the suffering of animals than on human beings. There is some discussion of rescuing dogs from kill shelters in the US and lots of details about endangered rhinos and elephants in Africa, a little discussion of the native-born poachers who are their main predators, and absolutely no mention of the very real massacres and genocides — some estimates put the number at 100 million or more people — orchestrated by the British “at its zenith,” to use Harry’s phrase. This move, to focus on animal welfare rather than on the vicious destructiveness of colonialism, is quintessential tactic for upholding whiteness. It at once anchors in the moral purity (saving the animals) while it distracts from the larger reality of the work of empire.

This becomes clear in the book when Harry and his brother Will fight about which one of them will “get” to work on Africa:

“Africa was his (Will’s) thing, he said. And he had a right to say this, or felt he did, because he was the Heir. It was ever in his power to veto my thing, and he had every intention of exercising, even flexing that veto power. We’d had some real rows about it … (when someone asked): Why can’t you both work on Africa? Willy had a fit, flew at (this person) for daring to make such a suggestion. Because rhinos, elephants, that’s mine! “

The scramble to save African “rhinos, elephants” while fighting over who gets to claim ownership of that virtue is, as they say, peak whiteness.

It may sound provocative to link sadomasochism with whiteness but hear me out. I mean this in the general sense of “inflicting pain and enjoying experiencing pain” without a necessarily sexual connotation. This is, I’ve argued elsewhere, endemic in white families. The dynamic is this: I torture you and then hate myself because I’ve mistreated you, then I want to hurt you again because I’m so angry at you that you’ve made me feel this way about myself. It is the underlying dynamic in intimate partner abuse, and these rituals of domination and humiliation play out in Spare.

Of being forced to walk behind his mother’s coffin in the funeral cortege, Harry says: “Why did the adults do that to us?” Uncle Charles (Diana’s brother) is apparently the only adult who objected, saying “it’s barbaric,” but no other adults intervened on their behalf that day.

The dress up in a Nazi uniform incident was, according to the book, a suggestion from Will and Kate, who must have known the controversy and resulting humiliation Harry would face for this stunt. When Harry is sent to meet with a rabbi to atone for this, he says: “I’d arrived at his house feeling shame. I now felt something else, a bottomless self-loathing.” That particular kind of self-loathing, too, is part of whiteness once you realize you’re part of it.

As an adult, Harry gets permission to keep his beard when he marries (yes, this is a thing he had to plead to the Queen about). This pisses off Will (“He hated the idea of me enjoying a perk he’d been denied.”). So, at his stag party before the wedding, Harry writes that he “feared that if I got too clear, got too drunk and passed out, Willy and his mates would hold me down and shave me. In fact Willy told me, explicitly, in all seriousness, that this was his plan. So, while having fun, I was also at all times keeping my older brother in my sight.” Will has suffered, and angry, now he intends to make his brother suffer in new and imaginative ways.

Even in his happiest pre-Meghan time, when Harry is in the Army, he speaks of the “stolid group of lovable sadists called color sergeants,” who put him through the ordeal known as Boot Camp.

The most damning evidence of the cruelty at the heart of whiteness comes through in Harry’s relationship with his father, whom he calls Pa. Toward the end of the book, when Harry and Meghan are still trying to plead with the family to respond to some of the most vicious and racist lies from the British tabloids, they identify one of the leakers from within the Royal Rota. It is a woman who works in Charles’ press office. When confronted with the facts of this discovery, the book describes his response this way:

“Pa refused to listen. His response was churlish, pathetic. Granny (the Queen) has her person, why can’t I have mine?”

Both Charles (Pa) and Will come across in the book as thoroughly aggrieved. Here is a description of the frustrated older brother:

He seemed aggrieved. He seemed put upon that I wasn’t meekly obeying him, that I was being so impertinent as to deny him, or defy him, to refute his knowledge, which came from his trusted aides. There was a script here and I had the audacity not to be following it. He was in full Heir mode, and couldn’t fathom why I wasn’t dutifully playing the role of the Spare.”

In this book, Harry is narrating the beginning of his defection from whiteness by pulling away from his family and toward Meghan. At the same time, he confesses his continuing affection for the monarchy and the British Empire. So, a step away from the “unconscious bias” that is baked into whiteness, but not quite to decolonizing his mind.

It’s a journey. And good for him for starting on this path. I really do mean that. There are very real, material consequences for divesting from whiteness, especially when it comes in such a complicated, gilded package as it does in this family.

Even so, in Harry’s very small steps away from the hollowness of whiteness and into the fullness of life beyond it, those who are still trapped may try to destroy you. The book puts it this way:

“Clearly this was more than simple anger. These men and women (of the British press) saw me as an existential threat. If our leaving posed a threat to the monarchy, as some were saying, then it posed a threat to all those covering the monarchy for a living. Hence, we had to be destroyed.”

While he’s talking about the people who rely on the papparrazi-tabloid-industrial-complex for their livelihood, there is a central truth here about divesting from whiteness. If people around are so deeply invested in it that they cannot imagine a different world, then they will try to pull you back in.

For his part, it looks like Harry has drawn on multiple types of healing traditions to learn a new way of being a whole human being. My favorite passage in the book is an exchange with Meghan, in which he is cruel to her and she insists he go to therapy:

(Meghan wanted to know): “Where did you ever hear a man speak like that to a woman? Did you overhear adults speak that way when you were growing up? I cleared my throat, looked away. Yes. She wasn’t going to tolerate that…We both knew my anger hadn’t been caused by anything to do with our conversation. It came from somewhere deep inside, somewhere that needed to be excavated, and it was obvious that I could use some help with the job. I’ve tried therapy, I told her. Willy told me to go. Never found the right person. Didn’t work. No, she said softly. Try again.”

I love that he shared this story and for his vulnerability in admitting he needed therapy. Elsewhere in the book he talks about the use of psychedelics as another path to healing, which I was also glad to see mentioned in this book.

Of course, many people will be outraged that someone so privileged, so very wealthy and from a lineage that is so directly and inextricably tied to horrors of colonialism should get to have this kind of healing when so many others in the Empire are denied it.

For me, the book and Harry’s story raise a bigger question, one I’m grappling with in lots of ways including here, which is this: Do white people deserve healing? I’m not sure I know the answer yet, but I do know that without healing from the trauma of whiteness then we’re trapped in the repeating cycles of harm we’ve inherited.