Sure, ‘Spare’ is Revealing—But the Real Story is What Prince Harry’s Not Saying
By Stacy Lee Kong
Image: Shutterstock
If you haven’t read it yet/haven’t been keeping up on the news coverage, Prince Harry says a lot of things in his new memoir, Spare. Just… so many things.
He touchingly writes about his grief over his mother’s death, and his unwillingness to believe that she was really gone (he writes that he desperately wanted to believe she was in hiding, instead). He shares all sorts of insight about life as a royal, from what it was like to have armed bodyguards accompany him everywhere to the unspoken but very real hierarchy between the heir (Prince William) and the spare (himself), to the décor at royal residences like Balmoral Castle and Sandringham House.
And, as we’ve seen in news coverage and in late-night interviews, he goes into great detail about rifts within the royal family. In the first few pages, he makes the snarky observation that William’s resemblance to their mother had faded and he was balding faster than Harry, and... that’s the general level of no-holds-barred honesty for the entire book, tbh. He goes on to reveal his father’s discomfort with showing affection, his competitive relationship with his brother, the times he did drugs as a teenager, the fact that the brothers urged their father not to marry Camilla, his father’s pre-engagement assertion that he didn’t have enough money to support Harry and Meghan after their wedding, and all sorts of behind-the-scenes details on the infighting between William, Kate, Meghan and himself, including his perception that Kate was “on edge” because she’d soon be “compared to, and forced to compete with, Meg.”
He even shares a bunch of things I’d rather not know, such as how he lost his virginity (in a field behind a pub, at 17, to an older woman who treated him like a “young stallion”) whether he’s circumcised (despite reports saying otherwise, he is) and that once, on a trip to the North Pole, he got frostbite on his ears, cheeks and penis (just… why).
But in Spare’s 407 pages, there are two things he never truly explores: two institutions that he still technically belongs to—the military and the monarchy—and why he still believes in them. Because for all that Harry criticizes the way the monarchy has treated him and Meghan, he still thinks it should exist. And he’s even more enamoured of the military. It’s those stark truths that made me realize that when we talk about this couple as truth-tellers and rebels, it’s possible we’re giving them a bit too much credit.
Harry is a military man, through and through
The passage from Spare that has received the most attention—outside of the straight-up gossip—is the one about the number of people Harry killed in Afghanistan.
“Most soldiers can’t tell you precisely how much death is on their ledger,” he writes. “In battle conditions, there’s often a great deal of indiscriminate firing. But in the age of Apaches and laptops, everything I did in the course of two combat tours was recorded, time-stamped. I could always say precisely how many enemy combatants I’d killed. And I felt it vital never to shy away from that number. Among the many things I learned in the Army, accountability was near the top of the list. So, my number: Twenty-five. It wasn’t a number that gave me any satisfaction. But neither was it a number that made me feel ashamed…
While in the heat and fog of combat, I didn’t think of those twenty-five as people. You can’t kill people if you think of them as people. You can’t really harm people if you think of them as people. They were chess pieces removed from the board. Bads taken away before they could kill Goods. I’d been trained to ‘other-ize’ them, trained well. On some level I recognized this learned detachment as problematic. But I also saw it as an unavoidable part of soldiering. Another reality that couldn’t be changed.
To be fair, a lot of the early criticism of this passage was based on reporting about the leaked Spanish version and focused on the number itself, and the idea that bragging about kill-counts are crass because good soldiers “don’t do notches on the rifle butt,” as retired army colonel Tim Collins said. But I don’t actually get the sense that Harry was bragging here; in fact, what he’s doing is arguably more problematic. He’s talking about his belief in his mission, and by extension, the army and the entire British military apparatus. In the second paragraph, he barely acknowledges that he was literally trained to see brown people as something other than human in order to complete a mission, and he definitely doesn't question the validity of that mission. (He also never makes a connection between the way the military dehumanized Afghan people and the way the British press dehumanizes his wife.) In fact, on the very next page of the book, he talks about watching September 11 happen while at Eton and how he never forgot meeting the victims’ families years later in New York. He explicitly says, “fighting [the Taliban] meant avenging one of the most heinous crimes in world history, and preventing it from happening again.” Nowhere does he acknowledge the possibility that those 25 people weren't all "Bads"—even though, according to a 2008 Human Rights Watch report, hundreds of civilians were killed and even more were injured due to airstrikes just between 2005 and 2008.
And let's not forget the cost Afghan people paid for that revenge mission: twenty years of war, the deaths of 70,000 Afghan civilians, 444 aid workers and 72 journalists, mass poverty, an epidemic of food insecurity, human rights abuses, reduced access to healthcare… and very little change. This is not even to mention the racist and orientalist discourse around this war, which directly incited untold amounts of Islamophobia, racism and Orientalism against Muslims—as well as non-Muslim but vaguely brown-looking people, because racists don’t often worry about accuracy when they’re hurling slurs or fists.
Elsewhere in the book, Harry speaks passionately about finding purpose in being a soldier, as well as excitement, perspective and even happiness. It becomes such an integral part of his identity that when he’s deciding to leave the military in 2014, he realizes that he can continue being a solider without actually being a solider, and that is what allows him to come to terms with the end of his military service. But it’s this snippet that most demonstrates his uncritical belief in the institution, even though it’s the same one that directly upheld the monarchy’s colonial regimes and continues to uphold imperialism today. (It’s also (still) deeply racist, FYI.)
And he may not think of himself this way, but Harry is a royalist, too
Similarly, for all that Harry points out the costs of belonging to the British monarchy, it’s clear that he sees media and PR flacks as the true enemy, not the institution itself. Whether he’s talking about the way the press called for an official show of mourning from the royals after Princess Diana’s death (he remembers a specific headline, “Show Us You Care,” which he characterized as “rich, coming from the same fiends who ‘cared’ so much for Mummy that they chased her into a tunnel from which she never emerged”) or being chased by paparazzi himself (which he described as literally traumatizing) or recounting the many, varied racists ways the British press criticized Meghan Markle (you know how that has been), he saves his harshest criticism for the press—and maybe for the people he believes play into their hands by trading information about rival members of the family in exchange for positive coverage of themselves (ahem, Camilla), especially if they do so while professing to believe in the family’s motto, “never complain, never explain” (Charles and William).
The way the British press treated his mother, and currently treats him and his wife, is horrific and deserves harsh criticism, of course. It’s just a little wild to me that he can spend 400+ pages talking about his life, and how much of it was made difficult, sad or unsafe simply because of the family he was born into, and never think about the value of the institution itself. Because he never really digs into about why the monarchy exists, who its existence serves, or how it might be detrimental to um, anyone who’s not a member of the royal family beyond being hounded by the press. In fact, he continually signals his admiration for the Crown. Take his reverence for the physical crown, for example. About halfway through the book, he recounts a visit to the Tower of London with Will and Kate that ends with the trio staring at his grandmother’s crown through a pane of thick glass. “It looked heavy. It also looked magical,” he writes. “The crown seemed to possess some inner energy source, something beyond the sum of its parts, its jeweled band, its golden fleurs-de-lis, its crisscrossing arches and gleaming cross… I moved my eyes slowly, appreciatively, from the bottom to the top. The crown was a wonder, a transcendent and evocative piece of art… but all I could think in that moment was how tragic that it should remain locked up in this Tower. Yet another prisoner.”
He could just as easily be talking about how he sees the monarchy itself—beautiful, magical, meaningful and meant to be free. But again, there’s no nuanced evaluation here, of either the symbol or the institution. This is especially egregious because by this point in the book, he’s already acknowledged that his ancestors amassed their wealth through theft. During his great-grandmother’s funeral, he remembers his eye continually being drawn to the crown that sat on her coffin, which was not the one from the Tower of London. This one featured “a diamond the size of a cricket ball. Not just a diamond, the Great Diamond of the World, a 105-carat monster called the Koh-i-Noor. Largest diamond ever seen by human eyes. ‘Acquired’ by the British empire at its zenith. Stolen, some thought,” he writes. “I'd heard it was mesmerising, and I'd heard it was cursed. Men fought for it, died for it, and thus the curse was said to be masculine. Only women were permitted to wear it.” There is probably no better symbol of British colonialism than the Koh-i-Noor diamond and the 18,999 other jewels the British monarchy took from India and refused to return. What does this guy mean, “stolen, some thought”?!
But actually, this brief and superficial aside is perfectly in keeping with his understanding of his family’s history, or lack thereof, and his stated belief that there is a place for the monarchy in the 21st century (though he does say “not the way that it is now,” to be fair).
The bar is just so, so low for privileged, wealthy people
As usual, many things can be true at once. The monarchy absolutely fumbled the bag when it came to Meghan Markle—she could have helped guide the institution into a new era of modernity and diversity, one that better connected to young Britons and endeared the royals to members of the Commonwealth. Britain, and especially its royal family and tabloid media, are horrifically racist. And, we probably know a tiny bit too much about Harry and Meghan after their Netflix docuseries, their various interviews and now Spare.
But also: we were kind of eager to cast the couple in the role of Progressive Prince and Princess, right? Maybe a little too eager? Both Harry and Meghan have made the decision to speak openly about racism in the royal family and in British society as a whole, even though they know this will only invite more abuse, and that’s commendable. I am also very here for anything and anyone that draws attention to the painful, oppressive history of the monarchy, and I personally enjoyed seeing the royals scramble to keep up with the H&M PR machine, which frankly is just better than theirs. But the more the couple reveals, the clearer it becomes that their understanding of race and racism is still lacking, and even though some of us have been assigning radicalism to them, they are not radical themselves.
Take Harry’s admission in a 60 Minutes interview that he was “probably bigoted” before his relationship with Meghan. When Anderson Cooper presses him on that statement, he says, “I don’t know. Put it this way: I didn’t see what I now see.” It’s clear that he has done a lot of reading, and that he means well. But something about the way he dances around this comment doesn’t sit right with me. Bad enough that he wasn’t able to recognize racism until it directly affected someone he loves (which, yes, I know is common but still strikes me as an annoying failure of both empathy and observation), but now he won’t even own that in retrospect?
In Spare, he very obviously refuses to acknowledge any of the ways Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Philip may have upheld problematic traditions or signed off on hurtful decisions, much less said or did racist or otherwise bigoted things. And let’s not forget that in another recent TV interview, he told ITV journalist Tom Bradby that he doesn’t believe the royal family is racist and that their behaviour is instead a result of unconscious bias. Which… is unfortunately not the case, and is actually a pretty harmful statement. As Refinery29 Unbothered UK writer Maxine Harrison argues, “whilst Harry has shown that he is working towards becoming an ally for the Black community, his failure to acknowledge unconscious bias as racism, is unfortunately another example of how the monarchy tip toes around real issues around race without calling it out as what it is.” Also... Prince Philip was famously overtly racist, so Harry's logic doesn't even make sense.
And it’s not just him. After Harry & Meghan was released, writer Nylah Burton was critical of Meghan’s claim she wasn’t treated like a Black woman until her relationship with Harry. In fact, Burton writes, “Meghan wants us to believe she was naive about racism, and that the U.K. was a brutal wake-up call. This feels only half true. The U.K. was a brutal wake-up call—not to the realities of racism, but to the fact that being biracial (and not identifying as Black) did not protect her from the intense anti-Blackness she experienced. But by her own admission, she was not unaware of the racial dynamics in the U.S. She lived through the 1992 Los Angeles uprising, saw her mother being called racial slurs, and heard stories of her grandfather’s experiences navigating sundown towns. Meghan knew racism existed, she just felt a comfortable distance from it because of the way she looked. She felt so comfortable that she thought she could marry into the British royal family—an institution built on the corpses of colonized and enslaved Black and brown people—and be accepted. While I’m skeptical her involvement with the royal family was the first time she experienced racism or anti-Blackness, it likely was the first time she found herself unable to ignore it, or comfort herself by knowing darker-skinned people had it worse.”
None of this is meant to diminish the impact of their experiences, or to divert any blame or judgment from the monarchy, press and social media users who so, so clearly hate Black women in general, and Meghan in particular. But their goal has never been to dismantle an oppressive system; it has been to make that system more welcoming to people like them. So, I think this should be a reminder to us—myself included—that just because someone is calling out something we don’t like, doesn’t mean we should automatically lionize them. Having some of this figured out doesn't mean they have it all figured out, and unfortunately, the time it takes for powerful people to catch up can cause real harm.
And Did You Hear About…
How buy now, pay later apps are landing Gen Z in debt.
Self EIC Rachel Wilkerson Miller’s recent essay on the true meaning of rest—and why it’s such a difficult thing to actually do.
All those tweets about perfect songs in different genres (i.e., pop, R&B, soca, reggae, K-pop).
This smart piece about the Brad Pitt lovefest at last weekend’s Golden Globes, and why it’s an indicator that Hollywood has actually learned nothing from #MeToo.
Screaming Ava, a very cute dog that judges annoying men on TikTok.
A Small Amount of Self-Promotion
I’ve been doing interviews and not telling you about them, so: over the holidays, I did a (kind of vulnerable) Q&A with writer Kate Carraway for her newsletter, The Feeling. And, I hung out with the team at CBC’s About That with Andrew Chang a couple of times, first to talk about the culture clash happening in holiday romance movies and then to give my pop culture predictions for 2023.
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