A Black family cries over Queen Elizabeth's death (TikTok video) / Top left: Queen Elizabeth (AP22251040135727) / Right: Queen Elizabeth II at Kaduna Airport, Nigeria, in 1956. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty Images)
The death of Queen Elizabeth on Sept. 8 at the age of 96 brought out an array of emotions from Black Americans and Black people in the diaspora. Judging from the comments on social media, many Black people were not saddened by her passing. In fact, some took to Twitter to remind the world of the monarch’s role in the colonization of Africa and the Caribbean.
A Carnegie Mellon University professor of Nigerian descent caused an uproar and backlash from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos over her blasting of the British reign in Africa. Linguistics Professor Uju Anya described the late queen as the monarch of a “thieving raping genocidal empire.”
“This is someone supposedly working to make the world better? I don’t think so. Wow,” Bezos tweeted in response.
Anya stood by her tweet: “May everyone you and your merciless greed have harmed in this world remember you as fondly as I remember my colonizers.”
She wrote, “If anyone expects me to express anything but disdain for the monarch who supervised a government that sponsored the genocide that massacred and displaced half my family and the consequences of which those alive today are still trying to overcome, you can keep wishing upon a star.”
Now a viral video of a Black African family crying over the loss of Queen Elizabeth as though she was a family member has stirred the pot even more.
“What did Elizabeth ever do for them to be acting this way????” asked ImAGirlYouLoser! tweeted.
Others on Twitter could not understand the Black family’s display of grief.
“Some sick negros,” Aflow tweeted.
“C00ning at it’s finest,” Stakastic Mastermind tweeted.
“These KneeGrows are Truly Crying over that old Vampire,” tweeted Sonya RavenCall.
Yet other tweeters mentioned the lingering effects of colonization.
“Nothing is more sad, embarrassing, and pathetic than a Colonized Mind,” DoesNotCompute tweeted.
“This demonstrates these colonized people do not know their history or they would be celebrating the non-human psychosexual maladaptive aggressive whites privileged white supremacist demon’s demise,” SweetSIStar tweeted.
Racism is still a major issue in the United Kingdom. A recent study found that more than two in five Black, brown, and minority ethnic workers in the UK say they have faced racism on the job.
And, 41 percent of those workers “faced racism at work in the last five years,” according to a report published by the Trades Union Congress, a federation of labor unions. The TUC said it is the biggest study into the issue ever conducted in the UK.
Younger workers reported the highest number of racist encounters. About 52 percent of Black, brown, and minority ethnic workers aged 25 to 34 years old revealed they suffered racism during that period, while 58 percent of those aged between 18 and 24 years old said the same.
This report lifts the lid on racism in UK workplaces. It shines a light on the enormous scale of structural and institutional discrimination BME workers face,” TUC General Secretary Frances O’Grady told CNN.
“Many told us they experienced racist bullying, harassment — and worse. And alarmingly, the vast majority did not report this to their employer,” she added.
A Black family cries over Queen Elizabeth’s death (TikTok video) / Top left: Queen Elizabeth (AP22251040135727) / Right: Queen Elizabeth II inspects men of the newly renamed Queen’s Own Nigeria Regiment, Royal West African Frontier Force, at Kaduna Airport, Nigeria, during her Commonwealth Tour, in 1956. (Hulton-Deutsch Collection/Corbis/Getty Images)
