Even Meghan Markle can’t make feudal privilege acceptable

So, Britain has a black princess (or a “biracial” one, as the princess herself would have it). Along with anticipation of the dress and gossip about her extended family has come a debate about how much Meghan Markle will transform both the royal family and perceptions of blackness and Britishness. It’s a debate as dysfunctional as the Windsors themselves.

According to the 2011 census, 2.3 million people in Britain are either married to, or living with, someone of a different ethnicity. The excitement and, for some, apprehension at Harry doing the same is a reflection not of how much the monarchy is being modernised, but of how anachronistic it really is.

In today’s celebrity culture, Meghan may actually be the most authentic royal of them all. In the past, the mystique of the royals derived from the distance between their lives and those of their subjects and from the secrecy with which they surrounded their affairs. Now, the royals capture the imagination for exactly the opposite reason: they’ve become a soap opera in which their every sneeze is splashed across the gossip pages. Welcome to Meghan’s world.

As for the belief that Meghan will break down barriers for black people and make minorities more accepted as truly British, that’s as anachronistic as the monarchy. Faced by an abusive skinhead or by a police officer about to stop and search me, my first thought has never been: “If only there was a black Windsor, then I might be accepted more.”

Nor can I work out why adding a few more black dukes and duchesses, or even kings and queens, should be a step forward. Equality does not mean making inherited privilege more “diverse”. It requires us to get rid of the whole shebang. Adding a splash of colour to a feudal relic is not my idea of social progress.

• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist