Between March 9 and 10 2022, thousands of netizens, as well as a number of influential journalists, and notably Bernice King, a daughter of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and a Christian minister herself, lambasted Prince William, the second in line to the throne of the United Kingdom, for being allegedly both a shameless racist and a “deeply offensive” ignorant.
The critical outburst was ignited after several British news outlets, having a PA Media report as source1, publicized details of the seemingly benign visit of the Duke of Cambridge and his wife, the Duchess Catherine, to the Ukrainian Cultural Centre in London amid the global shock that had been spawned by the Russian Armed Forces’ full-scale attack on Ukraine. The specific cause of the scandal was the following quote included in the PA Media report: “William, 39, said Britons were more used to seeing conflict in Africa and Asia. ‘It’s very alien to see this in Europe. We are all behind you,’ he said.”
William was denounced as a racist because he “normalised war and death in Africa and Asia,” while conveying an implicit suggestion that they were incompatible with Europe, his home continent. Besides, the evidence of his ignorance was found in the fact that, when NATO bombed Belgrade, the capital of Serbia, in 1999, he was close to the age of majority and achieving high grades in History and Geography in his final year at Eton College, one of the most prestigious high schools in the world and often referred as the “nurse of England’s statesmen.”
William was unaware of the historical magnitude of the refugee crisis triggered by the Kosovo War, something that had not been seen in European soil since World War II – what’s more, the teenage years of the well-traveled Prince, who holds a degree in Geography awarded by the University of St Andrews and the rank of Flight Lieutenant in the Royal Air Force, should have been permeated by a relentless flow of news coming not just from the Kosovan chapter of the Western Balkans Wars but also from the frontlines of all the bloody military confrontations that tore apart ex-Yugoslavia.
Remarkably, many of the accusations of racism raised against William, though not those pointing out his presumptive blatant ignorance of recent European history, were retracted few hours after their rapid dissemination online, as soon as a royal producer at ITV, a British television network, released a short video documenting part of the conversations the Duke of Cambridge had with volunteers and officials in the referred cultural center. The clip was considered enlightening because no mentions of Africa and Asia were registered in it. Richard Palmer, the only royal correspondent that covered William’s visit and, as such, who was responsible for the quote included in the PA Media report, apologized publicly and said that a “remark [William] made was misheard.”
The way in which this scandal was swiftly brought to an end in favor of William’s reputation …
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