An Antiracist Guide to Watching King Charles’ Coronation
On May 6, millions of televisions across the world will be tuned in to watch the coronation of King Charles III. This is the first British coronation since his mother, Queen Elizabeth II, took the throne in 1953. And much has changed.
When the queen was placed on the throne, the British empire was still largely intact and the population of the British Isles was so overwhelmingly white that there was no need to account for minorities on the census (ethnicity only became a surveyed question in 1991). Seventy years later, 18 percent of the population of England and Wales are from a racialized minority, and in the major cities Birmingham and Leicester it is now white people who are the minority.
Elizabeth’s coronation also predated race equality legislation, that she was exempt from when it came into force and Charles remains exempt from to this day. That revelation was just one of a series of scandals around racism that has beset the royal family.