Since Prince Harry left the royal family he’s been casting about for a new role, a new calling, beyond talking mournfully about himself to the highest bidder. Going by his bombshell memoir, Spare, and the cascade of interviews surrounding it, an obvious vocation presents itself: diversity trainer.
It’s a lucrative industry, after all. And if Harry’s recent media blitz is anything to go by, he’s taken to all the woke mantras with the zeal of a convert. He’s suggested that the royals need to confront their ‘unconscious bias’ if the monarchy is to have any chance of surviving. Harry even told CBS that he himself was ‘probably bigoted’ before he met his mixed-race wife, Meghan Markle. By which he seems to mean he was blissfully unaware of the scale of racism in society.
In his book, Harry blames his own racial indiscretions as a young man – such as dressing up as a Nazi and referring to a fellow cadet at Sandhurst as a ‘Paki’ – on his ‘unconscious bias’ and the privilege he was raised in. So sheltered was this carrot-topped prince, Harry improbably claims, that aged 21 he genuinely thought ‘Paki’ was as inoffensive as ‘Yankee’.
Unconscious bias – also known as implicit bias – is a concept that has been curdling in academia for almost three decades, first developed by psychologists Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald in the mid-Nineties. They designed the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which has been used millions of times to measure the prejudices people allegedly hold without realising.
Hellbound and Down 