Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II on Thursday, leftist political commentators on both sides of the pond rushed in to condemn the beloved British Monarch for allegedly representing “white supremacy” and colonialism, despite presiding over one of the greatest periods of decolonisation in human history.
Apparently unable to contain their vitriol to allow for a brief period of grace following the death of the Queen, many of the usual suspects among the professionally aggrieved came out to denounce her legacy.
Leading the charge in Britain was Birmingham City University’s professor of “Black Studies”, Kehinde Andrews, who said: “If a good job of being Queen is to represent white supremacy and to represent that link to colonialism, then yeah, I think she’s done a very good job.”
“If you look at the Royal Family as an institution, I mean it’s still very, very strong, it’s weathered some heavy storms including Prince Andrew, Meghan Markle, and all this and still going strong and she’s still very, very popular so I guess… she kept the image of the Royal Family mafia very established, yes, I think she’s done a good job,” he added mockingly.
The leftist professor is frequently brought on British television programmes to denounce the country as racist, such as when he argued that the “British Empire did far more harm to the world” than Nazi Germany, going on to proclaim that “whiteness is a psychosis”.
On the other side of the Atlantic, Sunny Hostin said on The View on Friday that the British monarchy — which well predated the African slave trade — “was built on the backs of black and brown people” and that it was a “thieving and raping genocidal empire”.
“She wore a crown with pillaged stones from India and Africa. Now what you are seeing, at least in the black communities that I’m a part of, they want reparations,” the ABC legal analyst added.
Meanwhile, MSNBC political analyst Richard Stengel denounced Americans for having a “weakness” towards the British Royal Family, claiming that many want to go back to a time of “hereditary privilege.”
“British colonialism, which she presided over for all these years, had a terrible effect on much of the world,” he said.
30th November 1961: HM Queen Elizabeth II receiving a bouquet from a small native girl, watched by the Duke of Edinburgh and others, during the Royal Tour of Sierra Leone. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)
On the contrary, following the Queen’s ascension to the throne in 1952, the United Kingdom embarked upon a rapid programme of decolonisation in Africa, with many historians pointing to her reign as the end of the British Empire.
Historically, the fact that the United Kingdom was the first country to abolish the slave trade is also often overlooked by leftist political commentators. Indeed, even beyond abolishing the barbaric practice domestically in 1807, the Royal Navy embarked on an expensive campaign to stamp out slavery across the world, with its West Africa Squadron alone capturing an estimated 1,600 slave trade ships and liberating some 150,000 African slaves.
Between 1830 and 1865 some 1,587 British sailors lost their lives in this fight against slavery.
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