![]() A Twitter user detailed the stolen Indian gems among over 23,000 crown jewels-the most valuable, the Kohinoor diamond, sits at the center of the queen mother’s crown-and reminded readers that the British Empire had extracted “$45 trillion in wealth” from the country. ![]() “We just chose this language?”) Some posters recalled that just after the queen took the throne in 1952, Britain established “brutal concentration camps in colonialist Kenya” that killed and tortured tens of thousands during the Mau Mau rebellion. (“‘Respect the dead’ when we’re all writing these Tweets *in English.* How’d that happen, hm?” one African American woman wrote. There were reminders that the royals even today benefit from a transatlantic slave trade that still causes global Black suffering. On social media, while Paris Hilton was calling the queen “the original girlboss,” users from Black, Irish, and other diaspora communities subjugated under colonialism recalled the apartheid, famine, exploitation, and bloodshed inflicted by the British Empire and sustained during the queen’s seven-decade reign. How predictable, too, that the same hatred would be directed at people who responded to the queen’s death by forcing into view the brutal colonial legacies she presided over. So it was no surprise that #GoHomeMeghanMarkle trended, that a cluster of white women refused to shake Markle’s hand as she greeted mourners at Windsor Castle, that one viral tweet claimed it was “sickening” to watch her “pretending to be sad after making the Queen’s final years a misery.” Nor that those incidents were gleefully recounted by right-wing rags such as the UK’s Daily Mail and the New York Post. The Windsors’ brand has always been unmiscegenated whiteness as a proxy for imperial glory, and for royalists and racists both British and American, Markle’s entry into the family was a blemish on, even an invasion of, that monarchical legacy. Now that the queen has died, grief seems to be overshadowed in certain corners by the joy taken in blaming Markle for the passing of a 96-year-old woman whose health had been in decline over the past year. It was utterly unsurprising that the moment Buckingham Palace announced that Queen Elizabeth’s doctors were “concerned for Her Majesty’s health,” a gross amount of invective would be flung at Meghan Markle.
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