Prince Harry was “probably bigoted” before dating his wife Meghan, Duchess of Sussex.
The 38-year-old royal admitted he didn’t realise how prejudiced the UK could be until he got into a relationship with the biracial ‘Suits’ star and claimed her treatment by the media was much worse than other women who had married into the royal family, including his stepmother Queen Consort Camilla and sister-in-law Catherine, Princess of Wales, had gone through because of her heritage.
In a teaser clip for his upcoming interview on ’60 Minutes’, Harry said: “What Meghan had to go through was similar, in some part, to what Kate and what Camilla went through — very different circumstances.
“But then you add in the race element, which was what the British press jumped on straight away.
“I went into this incredibly naive. I had no idea the British press was so bigoted. Hell, I was probably bigoted before the relationship with Meghan.”
Host Anderson Cooper then asked Harry if he thought he was bigoted.
He replied: “I don’t know. Put it this way, I didn’t see what I now see.”
The clip was released shortly after an extract from the Duke of Sussex’s autobiography ‘Spare’ saw him claim he didn’t know the word “P***” was racist because he had “heard many people use the word” as a child and “had not seen anyone wince or get upset.”
Reflecting on the 2009 scandal when he apologised after footage, taken in 2006, emerged which showed him use the slur when talking about his Sandhurst colleague Ahmed Raza Khan.
He wrote: “And I didn’t know anything about unconscious biases either. I was twenty-one years old, I had grown isolated from the real world and wrapped in privilege, and I believed that word was the same as ‘Yankee.’ Harmless.”
Harry contacted his friend directly to apologise, but Ahmed told him he knew the prince wasn’t racist and “nothing happened”.
But the duke wrote that “it did happen” and he was left feeling worse by his friend’s forgiveness.