British Press Called Out on Tolerance of Prince Philip's Racism and Ignorance

Following Prince Philip's funeral, the UK's Sunday Times' remembered the royal as "an often crotchety figure, offending people with gaffes about slitty eyes, even if secretly we rather enjoyed them." 

Actress Gemma Chan called the paper out, saying, "The fact that this was written by a journalist who should know better, approved by editors and sent to print.  To trivialize casual racism in the most widely read Sunday broadsheet at a point when the Asian diaspora is experiencing a surge of attacks is deeply irresponsible."

The controversial article was published amid a recent wave of attacks against Asian Americans, including three March shootings at Atlanta-area spas that killed eight people, most of them women of Asian descent.

Stop AAPI Hate, a group that tracks acts of discrimination and xenophobia against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, found nearly 3,800 incidents of hate, discrimination or attacks on Asian Americans from March 2020 through February 2021.

Despite the overly-generous tributes in British media, Prince Philip will more infamously be remembered as the most casually racist and ignorant member of the British royal family, long espousing vaguely colonialist attitudes.  He was long tolerated as an insensitive jerk, due to the many offensive and derogatory remarks he made to the members of the public and officials from foreign countries.  

One of his most notorious jokes came around 30 years ago, when he is alleged to have told the German media: “In the event that I am reincarnated, I would like to return as a deadly virus, to contribute something to solving overpopulation.”

"Ghastly," was Prince Philip's assessment of Beijing, during a 1986 tour of China.  On the same visit, he later told 21-year-old British student Simon Kerby, "If you stay here much longer, you will go home with slitty eyes."

"Deaf? If you're near there, no wonder you are deaf." Philip once said to a group of deaf children standing near a Caribbean steel drum band in 2000.

"You managed not to get eaten then?" he asked a British student who had trekked in Papua New Guinea, during an official visit in 1998.

In 1993, he asked a British tourist during a tour of Budapest, "You can't have been here that long – you haven't got a pot belly."

"How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" he asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.

"It looks as though it was put in by an Indian." The Prince's assessment of a fuse box during a tour of a Scottish factory in August 1999.

In 1993, Philip told a group of  survivors of the Lockerbie Pan-Am disaster, "People usually say that after a fire it is water damage that is the worst. We are still drying out Windsor Castle."

"We don't come here for our health. We can think of other ways of enjoying ourselves." he said during a trip to Canada in 1976.

Philip shared his insight into the recession that gripped Britain in 1981:  "A few years ago, everybody was saying we must have more leisure, everyone's working too much. Now that everybody's got more leisure time they are complaining they are unemployed. People don't seem to make up their minds what they want."

"British women can't cook," Philip said in 1961, winning the hearts of the Scottish Women's Institute.

On the issue of stress counseling for servicemen in a TV documentary marking the 50th Anniversary of V-J Day in 1995:  "It was part of the fortunes of war. We didn't have counselors rushing around every time somebody let off a gun, asking 'Are you all right - are you sure you don't have a ghastly problem?' You just got on with it!"

"It's a vast waste of space." Philip entertained guests in 2000 at the reception of a new £18m British Embassy in Berlin, which the Queen had just opened.

"There's a lot of your family in tonight." After glancing at business chief Atul Patel's name badge during a 2009 Buckingham Palace reception for 400 influential British Indians to meet the Royal couple (Patel is a common name in India).

"If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it," Philip said to a World Wildlife Fund meeting in 1986.

To a woman in Kenya in 1984, after accepting a gift: "You ARE a woman, aren't you?"

"Do you know they have eating dogs for the anorexic now?"  Philip lamely joked to a wheelchair-bound Susan Edwards, and her guide dog Natalie in 2002.

In an interview shortly after the Dunblane shootings in 1996, Philip callously commented: "If a cricketer, for instance, suddenly decided to go into a school and batter a lot of people to death with a cricket bat, which he could do very easily, I mean, are you going to ban cricket bats?" 

At the opening of London's City Hall in 2002: "The problem with London is the tourists. They cause the congestion. If we could just stop the tourism, we could stop the congestion." .

"You must be out of your minds." Philip said to Solomon Islanders in 1982, on being told that their population growth was 5 per cent a year.

"Your country is one of the most notorious centers of trading in endangered species," He told the crowd upon accepting a conservation award in Thailand in 1991.

In the Cayman Islands in 1994: "Aren't most of you descended from pirates?"

To three young employees of a Scottish fish farm at Holyrood Palace in 1999, he blurted: "Oh! You are the people ruining the rivers and the environment."

"If you travel as much as we do you appreciate the improvements in aircraft design of less noise and more comfort – provided you don't travel in something called economy class, which sounds ghastly," he said in remarks to the Aircraft Research Association in 2002.

"The French don't know how to cook breakfast," he complained to French chief Regis Crépy in 2002, after a breakfast of bacon, eggs, smoked salmon, kedgeree, croissants and pain au chocolat.

"And what exotic part of the world do you come from?" he asked in 1999 of Tory politician Lord Taylor of Warwick, whose parents are Jamaican. He replied: "Birmingham."

Prince Philip shocked Aboriginal leader William Brin at the Aboriginal Cultural Park in Queensland in 2002, when he asked, "Do you still throw spears at each other?"

"Were you here in the bad old days? ... That's why you can't read and write then!" To parents during a visit to Fir Vale Comprehensive School in Sheffield, which had long suffered under poor academic conditions.

"So who's on drugs here?... HE looks as if he's on drugs," Philip callously said to a 14-year-old member of a Bangladeshi youth club in 2002.

Philip also once harassed 13-year-old aspiring astronaut Andrew Adams: "You could do with losing a little bit of weight,"

In 2000, he publicly said, "People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans."

"Do people trip over you?" Philip said in 2002 upon meeting a wheelchair-bound nursing-home resident in 2002.

"I don't think a prostitute is more moral than a wife, but they are doing the same thing." Dismissing claims that those who sell slaughtered meat have greater moral authority than those who participate in blood sports, in 1988.

"Cats kill far more birds than men. Why don't you have a slogan: 'Kill a cat and save a bird?'" On being told of a project to protect turtle doves in Anguilla in 1965.

"Why don't you go and live in a hostel to save cash?" He once asked of a penniless student.

"If it doesn't fart or eat hay, she isn't interested," Philip once said of his daughter, Princess Anne.

"It looks like a tart's bedroom," he said upon seeing plans for the Duke and then Duchess of York's house at Sunninghill Park.

Philip once said upon being introduced to a female solicitor: "I thought it was against the law these days for a woman to solicit."

On being shown "primitive" Ethiopian art in 1965, he commented: "It looks like the kind of thing my daughter would bring back from her school art lessons"