Prince Harry recently admitted in an interview with CBS that before meeting his now-wife Meghan Markel that he was probably “bigoted.”
He also disclosed that he was naive to how her ethnicity would play out in media coverage, the BBC reported.
“I went into this incredibly naive. I had no idea the British press were so bigoted. Hell, I was probably bigoted before the relationship with Meghan,” he told CBS interviewer Anderson Cooper.
Cooper then asked, “You think you were bigoted before the relationship with Meghan?”
“I don’t know. Put it this way, I didn’t see what I now see,” he responded.
Harry has been in the news ahead of his memoir “Spare,” which is scheduled to be published on Jan. 10. However, snippets from the book have been released, including one where he expresses regret for calling a South Asian cadet a racist slur while at Sandhurst.
Apparently, it was a racial slur considered one of the most offensive towards people of South Asian origin. One he says he heard lots of people say throughout his childhood.
The incident in question is from 2009 when footage circulated from a few years earlier of him calling a fellow Sandhurst cadet “my little [P-word] friend.”
“I didn’t know [it] was an insult,” he said. “When I was little, I’d heard lots of people use that word and had never seen anyone scowl or seem upset, and I’d never considered those people [using the word] to be racists,” he said.
“I was 21, I’d grown up isolated from the real world and surrounded by privileges, and I believed that word was like saying ‘Yankee.’ Innocuous.”