The New Yorker Radio Hour - Can the Royal Family Withstand Oprah’s Scrutiny?

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Meghan and Harry, the Duchess and Duke of Sussex, was riveting celebrity television, but it may also be a significant turning point in the history of the British royal family. Revelations about racism and about Meghan’s struggles with mental health are already reshaping public perception of the powerful institution. The interview also touched on racism and mental health, issues that are familiar to many families. “In the future, we will look to this interview as a real touchstone marking the change of who it is we see as authorities of their own experience,” says Doreen St. Félix. In conversation with St. Félix and the eminent historian Simon Schama, the author of a three-volume history of Britain, David Remnick discusses how the interview plays into culture wars in the U.K. and in American. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. All week long we've been talking about the interview, capital I, the interview, Megan Markle and Prince Harry, sitting down with Oprah Winfrey. That interview turned out to be something maybe weightier than we had any reason to expect, and we're still talking about it today because this drama in the House of Windsor grappled with everything from mental health issues to racism to the most enduring institution in the United Kingdom. So I called up two wonderful writers who have engaged with these questions to talk about it. The historian Simon Schummel, who will join us in a moment, and staff writer

Doreen St. Felix. Doreen, so I've got to admit that we were texting a little bit during that interview, and I thought the headline was going to be, you know, Kate made me cry or something like that. I had no idea that this interview was going to be as dramatic and in some way as important as it turned out to be. What were you expecting and what did we get? I mean, I think I was expecting. I think we all had in our mind the very infamous interview that Princess Diana did with Martin Bashir,

I think maybe 26 years ago, which was certainly an airing of grievances, but it was still wrapped up in the sense that, you know, Diana couldn't say everything that was on her mind possibly. And I think for me, it was the most striking part of the interview was not even so much Markle's revelations. You know, as a black woman in America, I wasn't really surprised to hear the treatment that she described. I think it was more so hairy, because Harry, we were watching, you know, he was so protective of his wife. He had his hand on her hand for the entirety of the interview. And he seemed like he was in a kind of personal

crisis. He wasn't as open as Markle, but in some ways that made him all the more revealing. You know, there were answers that he didn't want to necessarily provide to Oprah. And I think his hesitancy kind of showed for the viewer how deeply conditioned he had been, you know, by not only his family as a family, but also his family as a seat of power. Did you tell other people in the family I need to get help for her? We need help for her. That's just not a conversation

that would be had. What? I guess I was ashamed of admitting it to them. Oh. And I don't know whether they've had the same whether they've had the same feelings or thoughts. I have no idea. It's a very trapping environment

that a lot of them are stuck in. You were ashamed of admitting that Megan needed help. Yeah. Talk to me about Oprah as an interviewer. You know, it's been years since she's had an event like this. And I have to say, in some ways, I had been associating her with much more disappointing fair in recent years. You know, the kind of Dr. Oz and the other quacks that she probably has invested too much in.

This was something quite different. What are her qualities and what did you think of that performance? Right. So I think it's amazing to me that in a conversation that possibly has drained the royal family of its last dredges of cultural esteem, it's Oprah that everyone's talking about. And I think there's a couple of elements to that reaction. The first being, we're being brought back to the Oprah of the late 80s and the early 90s. It wasn't the Oprah of the past 20 years, the Oprah who has a massive deal with Apple, the Oprah who has become, you know, completely. emmeshed with political institutions like the Obama's. It was the Oprah of the 90s, the Oprah that we rushed home after school or after work to watch on her talk show. There's that really telling moment where Megan, you know, it happens twice, actually, if we want to talk about Oprah underlining the headline, or Megan describes someone in the family, possibly commenting on the potential skin color of her unborn child, who is now Archie.

Hold up. There are several conversations about it. There's a conversation with you. With Harry. About how dark your baby is going to be? Potentially and what that would mean or look like. And Oprah, we know her history. Oprah is not surprised to hear that Markle underwent, you know, a racist incident like that during her tenure at the family.

But when Oprah reacts in that way, when she gasps, when she stops her from talking, when she acts completely surprised what she is doing is teaching the viewer, teaching the audience, that that is the appropriate reaction to have to a revelation like that. And it's something that's like in deep contrast with what you might see on ITV, which is that infamous British gossip channel. And so I think in that way, Oprah has done. something really critical for Megan and Harry. She's taken them out of the idiom of British gossip news and brought them into the American sort of empathetic tabloid space. It really well said it because it's amazing the difference in reaction to this interview in Britain and the United States. I mean, you've got a lot of reaction also among American conservatives that was very much like some of the tabloids in Britain,

extremely disdainful of Megan, thinking she's overly sensitive at best and making things up and all the rest. It's become a kind of, yet again, a political flashpoint in the culture wars in the United States. Exactly. I think of someone like Megan Kelly sort of calling out Oprah and saying that she didn't ask tough enough questions. What that really means is that Oprah,

that Oprah is asking a different kind of tough question, you know, one that marks, I would say, a real changing in our appetites, our tolerance for what we want to see on American TV. I think that the era of the shock jock has long been gone. And, you know, in the future, we will look to this interview as a real touchstone. marking the change of like who it is that we see as authorities of their own experience. I think Oprah created a space where there was no question of doubting what Megan or Harry were talking about. And that's not something that has always been endemic to that kind of prime time interview. Tucker Carlson, who is probably the most vociferous voice now on Fox News along with Sean Hannity,

was utterly contemptuous of Megan and mocked her and said that, you know, she was treating dress colors as her 9-11 and that she was faking her victimhood. Above all, that was the theme. And faking victimhood is a theme on Fox News all the time that victimhood or people being the objects of oppression or aggression are somehow faking it,

somehow too soft that people ought to just let things go. Right. And I don't know if I'm actually just too optimistic. I think the the way that Fox News has been applying the same four or five virulent criticisms on increasingly sophisticated cultural conversations, it's just getting kind of old. And ultimately, this is about entertainment, right? This is about who can grab the audience first. And we look at the numbers. I think I read that Oprah was able to bring 50 million viewers to the interview.

And I don't think that 50 million people watched Tucker Carlson that night. No, probably not. Probably not. But he does have a sizable nightly audience. And it is interesting to see that the right is using these culture war and easily grasped moments much more than traditional policy questions, you know, Dr. Seuss or. or what happens at Smith College or this interview far more than, I don't know, higher or lower taxes or foreign policy or whatever.

These are front and center for the right. Right. And I think what we're also sort of seeing is how does the Trump culture vacuum get filled? But I think what is more interesting to me at least is that an interview like Megan Markles is going to persuade people who are more moderate in the center who, maybe felt strange about the increasingly open ways we talk about crises like mental health and race. I think there was just like fundamental relatability. And I saw the sorts of people who don't usually get caught up in pop cultural events,

becoming really swept up in concern and compassion for Megan and Harry in their play. But for the family, they very much have this mentality. of this is just how it is. This is how it's meant to be. You can't change it. We've all been through it. We've all been through the pressure. We've all been through being exploited.

What was different for me was the race element because now it wasn't just about her, but it was about what she represents. And therefore it wasn't just affecting my wife. It was affecting so many other people as well. Doreen St. Felix is a staff writer at The New Yorker and you can find her work

at New Yorker.com. Simon Shama is a British-born scholar who teaches at Columbia, and he's written on everything from the French Revolution to the history of the Jewish people. He's also the author of a three-volume history

of Great Britain, and someone, I'm very happy to call a friend. So, yeah, what a miss your gosh. Boy. Simon, you've been living here for half of forever, but British history is in your heart. You've written about it extensively.

What did this interview mean, if anything? Well, I think it's all really about British identity crisis, David, really. I mean, it won't have escaped your attention that both in the great kind of Brexit furor and with everything else that's happened since, particularly the possibility of the United Kingdom, not being so united anymore, and actually threatened by the possibility of a referendum on Scottish independence, there is a kind of national neurosis going on. And usually this has been calmed by the above politics presence of the monarchy.

But the monarchy is kind of stuck right now because it's trying to do at least two sets of very contradictory things. And the one hand, in order to pacify a national identity crisis, it's got to be timeless. But particularly for the younger generation of people living in Britain, it's also got to be of our times, especially since Black Lives Matter. You know, a lot of attention paid across the Atlantic, and also Black Lives Matter does matter in Britain itself. Well, what will this interview do, though, to shake the foundations of the monarchy? How can you predict that? It's generational, I think, as is so much of life these days, you know, politics as well.

There have already been opinion polls, you won't be surprised to hear, and it's shown a majority, if they can be trusted, you know, instant polls, who knows. But if they can be trusted, they've shown that the interview has the opposite effect to what it seems to have had in this country. It's not gone down terribly well. But it's the older generation, of course, actually, the 94-year-old queen, those who have the most deeply longing, nostalgic instincts for what Britain's supposed to be, who are comforted by the spectacle of the queen up there on her horse at the trooping of the colour, who are touched by Prince Philip being in hospital at the age of 99, all of that. The younger generation, much, much more exercised by the issue of race, by the whole notion of, you know, is the United Kingdom of essentially

a white United Kingdom or something else? And, I mean, the verdict really is out because those who've defended the monarchy in this particular furor, I mean, I'll write to note that when Megan was married to Harry, there was an enormous, you know, they were welcomed, as Megan herself said, with open arms by the queen. But by the country at large, if you remember the wedding, there was an American black preacher, there was the, you know, the black family, and so on. And there was a sort of much. in the spirit of the kind of Britain of the opening of the Olympic Games in 2012, a real, it seemed to be a real embrace of a multicultural, multiracial Britain. And, you know, this has been a kind of brutal counterpush, a brutal shock in the opposite direction.

The conversation about racism, about anti-blackness in Britain, plays out quite differently than it does in the United States. Tell me how that works. Well, it's getting to be less of a gap, as a matter of fact, I have to say. The British like to pat themselves on the head or on the back or wherever by saying, well, we actually abolished slavery in 1834. It took a civil war for America to do this.

We were one of the first countries to abolish the slave trade. In fact, only one year ahead of Jefferson's America. but there was a sort of sense of possibly disingenuous self-congratulation about, you know, the place of race that could be absorbed, sponge-like into British life. That's proving really to have feet of clay, that sort of notion really of an instinctively tolerant, inclusive Britain. These days, whether it's a discussion about so-called decolonising of the museums, a discussion about, how some of the great antiquities in the British Museum arrived as a result basically of imperial plunder. That's a conversation which is becoming profound now, and the sense that we all ought to be tremendously smug about early abolitionism

only seems to rub salt in that particular wound. So I would say that Britain is becoming, in matters of race, a more self-scrutinizing and angrier country in ways in which we would recognize here in the United States. Angrier in the sense of more polarized? Yeah, I think so. I guess it's amazing that an Oprah Winfrey interview with a former minor television star who becomes royalty

and someone who's not really very directly in the line of succession, Harry, has such resonance. Simon, would you be sorry to see the monarchy go? Yes, I would, which may surprise you. But then, of course, I'm an old Giza. Worse, I'm an old Giza historian. And therefore, I'm into antiquity. But, you know, you look around the world and think,

well, what's the alternative? If Britons really want to see what the alternative might be, you know, they look across the Atlantic and see what politics has been like at the court of King Donald I first. And they're much reassured, really, by the fact that that's not the case in Britain. Simon Shama, thank you, my friend.

It's good to talk to you. Okay, my day. Lovely to talk to you. Stay safe. All the best. Simon Shama is a professor at Columbia University and he's the author of more than a dozen works of history. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. Thanks for joining us.

See you next week. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. The New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.