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Fury as royals are accused of ‘ties to slavery’: Academic who made Nazi jibe at author of controversial race report sparks new row
- Professor Priyamvada Gopal said that the Royal Family was a ‘white’ institution
- Also claimed ties to slavery and compared black author of race report to a Nazi
- Latest intervention after she Royals were a white supremacist organisation
A Cambdridge academic who compared the black author of a race report to a Nazi has now criticised the royals for not talking about the Crown’s ‘ties’ to slavery.
Professor Priyamvada Gopal added that the Royal Family was a ‘white’ institution which had profited from the British Empire.
Dr Gopal, professor of Postcolonial Studies at Churchill College, caused uproar last week when she compared Dr Tony Sewell – who oversaw the Commission on Race and Ethnic Disparities – to Adolf Hitler’s propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels.
Dr Gopal said Dr Sewell’s race report was ‘rigged’ and ‘reads like a propaganda document’
Dr Gopal was also questioned about having ‘liked’ a tweet which claimed Prince Philip was the royal who the Duchess of Sussex claimed, in her Oprah Winfrey interview, had talked of ‘how dark Archie’s skin might be’
Her latest provocative intervention came when she was asked about having called the monarchy a ‘white supremacist organisation’ in the past.
It was ‘an institution invested in whiteness … and where whites dominate,’ replied Dr Gopal. ‘The monarchy is deeply implicated in the project of empire; a lot of what it possesses came right out of the imperial project.
‘This is not a monarchy that has ever talked about its ties to empire – or to slavery for that matter. I am not going to apologise [for saying that],’ she said.
Dr Gopal was also questioned about having ‘liked’ a tweet which claimed Prince Philip was the royal who the Duchess of Sussex claimed, in her Oprah Winfrey interview, had talked of ‘how dark Archie’s skin might be’.
She declined to say sorry for endorsing the tweet on the grounds that Prince Philip had made many ‘racial slurs’ over the years.
Nor did she regret the timing of her response to the tweet, made when the 99-year-old duke was in hospital.
Miss Winfrey has said the alleged comment did not come from the Queen or the Duke of Edinburgh.
The professor also claimed: ‘The monarchy couldn’t even handle a light skinned beautiful woman. She was the wife of a prince… and was drummed out of this country by the media.’
Defiant Dr Gopal said Dr Sewell’s race report was ‘rigged’ and ‘reads like a propaganda document.’ She stood by her comment, comparing him to Dr Goebbels. After finding out Dr Sewell had a PhD, she wrote on Twitter last week: ‘Even Dr Goebbels had a research PhD.’
Interviewed by Talk Radio’s Nick de Bois, who called her comments offensive, Dr Gopal said: ‘Collaborating with racism is the same as collaborating with Nazism.’
She also defended having criticised fellow Cambridge academics who supported Dr Sewell, saying: ‘Cambridge has a long history of denying its own institutional racism.’
When Dr Gopal first spoke out against Dr Sewell the university said it ‘profoundly disagreed’ with her comments but supported staff expressing their views.
In February Dr Gopal led a Cambridge debate in which academics discussed Churchill’s views of ‘white supremacy’ and his ‘mythic status’ in British public life. Birmingham City University’s Professor Kehinde Andrews used the debate to brand the British Empire ‘far worse than the Nazis’.
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