“British women can’t cook”
The Duke of Edinburgh:
“Everybody was saying we must have more leisure. Now they are complaining they are unemployed” (during the 1981 recession).
“You are a woman, aren’t you?” (in Kenya after accepting a small gift from a local woman).
“If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed” (to a group of British students during a royal visit to China).
“You can’t have been here that long, you haven’t got pot belly” (to a Briton he met in Hungary).
“Aren’t most of you descended from pirates?” (to a wealthy islander in the Cayman Islands).
“How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test” (to a Scottish driving instructor).
“It looks as if it was put in by an Indian” (referring to an old-fashioned fuse box in a factory near Edinburgh).
“Still throwing spears?” (question put to an Aboriginal Australian during a visit).
“There’s a lot of your family in tonight” (after looking at the name badge of businessman Atul Patel at a Palace reception for British Indians).
“The Philippines must be half-empty as you’re all here running the NHS” (on meeting a Filipino nurse at Luton and Dunstable Hospital).
Prince Philip to European aristocracy is what Donald Trump is to American liberal democracy: an embarrassment – the men who flaunt the ugly truth from under the thin veneer of their bourgeois etiquette.
There are other even more remarkable gems that the BBC has of course not listed but others have. But these should suffice.
Priceless racism
BBC’s transparent attempt at whitewashing notwithstanding, Prince Philip’s racism is actually quite priceless because it comes so naturally to him. He is not faking it. He is not trying to offend anyone. He is offensive. This is he. This is who he is – and the long panoply of his racist, sexist, elitist, misogynistic, class-privileged and unhinged prejudices is a mobile museum of European bigotry on display.
The Duke of Edinburgh has done the world an extraordinary service by being who he is, by staging generous servings of his bigoted disposition and he is retiring happily with having catalogued all or at least most of his priceless inventory for posterity to read and learn.
Our dearly beloved Duke of Edinburgh is blissfully old. He has lived a long, rich, and fulfilling life – and may he live the rest of his racist days with the dignity and poise that he has denied others. His xenophobic bigotry is pure, his sense of class entitlement undiluted, unencumbered, uncensored, liberated from any inkling of bourgeois inhibitions. He does not mean to be offensive. He just is. He is a walking embodiment of every layered lava of European racism summed up inside one royal head.
Today people of the privileged class have learned how to camouflage their racism in varied codes and convoluted bourgeois euphemism. The kind of bigotry that Prince Philip exudes and stages is now considered rude and vulgar, old-fashioned and outmoded, presumed classed and pointed at the lower social strata. The precious advantage of Prince Philip is that he is a royal from the heart of British (and European) aristocracy. He tells it as he sees it fit.
How my heart sings 