From the Left

/

Politics

Britain’s Identity Crisis — and Ours

Clarence Page, Tribune Content Agency on

Sorting out my own grief over the death of Queen Elizabeth II, I feel some of what I imagine Frederick Douglass felt when he wrote his historic speech titled “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July.”

Douglass had escaped slavery to become a journalist, orator, statesman and friend of a president, Abraham Lincoln.

“This Fourth of July is yours, not mine,” Douglass told an abolitionist audience in 1852 a decade before the Civil War. “You may rejoice, I must mourn.”

That describes the divided tone of reactions to the death of the queen last week, at 96. For most Brits, by various news accounts, it was a genuinely traumatic event. I would venture to say the same is true, although perhaps with less trauma, for many of us Americans who, like me, grew up knowing no other British monarch.

Former Prime Minister Boris Johnson, a past and perhaps-once-again-future newspaper columnist, outdid most tributes in describing her in a speech as “the person who all the surveys say appears most often in our dreams.”

Yet, as with all matters of history, there is another side to this story, especially when it deals with history as vast and complicated as the British Empire.

 

One particularly inflammatory tweet from Uju Anya, a Carnegie Mellon University professor, went viral on the day the queen passed away.

“I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying,” the professor tweeted. “May her pain be excruciating.”

To call that harsh would be an understatement. By the time the tweet was removed by Twitter for violating platform policies, an online backlash erupted, including a response from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

But Anya justified the ill will as rooted in her “very painful” experience with the British colonial government overseen by the queen, if mostly symbolically.

...continued

swipe to next page

(c) 2022 CLARENCE PAGE DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE MEDIA SERVICES, INC.

 

 

Comics

Tom Stiglich David Horsey Bart van Leeuwen John Cole Marshall Ramsey Ed Gamble