The official Instagram account for Kensington Palace has seen an uptick in racist comments directed at Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex. And the messages referring to Markle are no longer subtle, but rather talk of her being “gone soon.”
The Daily Mail says that the Kensington Palace Instagram page posted a video of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle’s recent trip to New Zealand and it sparked threatening comments from some users of the social media page.
“Soon it will be me who is next to Harry and Megssy will be gone.”
The person then added several emojis of someone with a knife in an angry pose.
Other posts accused Markle, who is of mixed race heritage, of bleaching her skin, and others called her “tacky” and trashy.”
Kensington Palace has been censoring their Instagram page, but some of the nastier comments have remained up for more than a week including some which referenced the duchess coming from “the ghetto.”
There are several followers who have posted messages addressed to Kensington Palace asking them to take down the hurtful comments, saying that they found them offensive and hateful towards the Duchess of Sussex.
I ? the sound of #racists heads exploding in the morning. https://t.co/DAPjEbRKUL
— PattyChocolateMilk (@PattyChocMilk) November 4, 2018
Yari Cohen, a media lawyer, said that posting threatening messages on Instagram could get someone in legal peril because the poster “is assuming to a degree that she [Meghan] is going to be reading it.”
Ever since it was announced in 2017 that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were dating, there has been racist comments and posts on social media and even on websites posing as news sources. It got bad enough at one point that Prince Harry insisted that Kensington Palace release a statement saying that the hate speech wouldn’t be tolerated.
“Some of this has been very public – the smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments. Some of it has been hidden from the public – the nightly legal battles to keep defamatory stories out of papers.”
Yvonne Ridley, a journalist, claimed that even the palace attempted to focus on Markle’s white heritage rather than accepting her as she is.
“Instead of celebrating her ethnic background the white colonialists from Buckingham Palace, Clarence House, and Kensington Palace are working round the clock to bleach Markle’s past.”
The palace has made it clear that hate speech and threats against members of the royal family will not be tolerated.