Today, Piers Morgan launched his latest attack against a woman of colour. In a column about Naomi Osaka, he berated the trailblazing tennis player for choosing not to partake in press conferences ahead of the French Open Roland-Garros tournament. She did this in order to protect her mental health after suffering depression and anxiety, but according to Piers, the 23-year-old is an ‘arrogant, spoiled brat’.
‘One thing's very clear: this has got nothing to do with mental health,’ he stated boldly. ‘This is straight out of the Meghan and Harry playbook of wanting to have the world's largest cake and eating it, by exploiting the media for ruthlessly commercial self-promotion but using mental health to silence any media criticism.’
It’s the second time he’s openly dismissed a woman of colour’s struggle with mental illness, and in choosing to equate Naomi with Meghan Markle – the woman he said lied about experiencing suicidal ideation to millions of Good Morning Britain viewers - it’s almost like he purposefully inflamed readers by comparing two women of colour he believes lies, or exaggerates, their mental health struggles. The racists would applaud, the rest of us would balk, wide-eyed at its blatancy.
But that’s what Piers does isn’t it, he incites anger – anger towards minorities, anger for minorities. It’s his shtick.
The problem is, it’s a shtick that allows him to be one step removed from a boycott. People think of Piers as a troll, as someone who purposefully says inflammatory things for attention, clicks and shares.
He was once vocal on left-wing ideology, even last year he had a brief stint of positive press for speaking out against Boris Johnson’s mishandling of the pandemic. People who meet him describe him as charming, as a mere shell of his audacious, right-wing caricature self. It can sometimes appear then, that he plays this hateful character in order to attract attention to his TV shows and tabloid columns. ‘He doesn’t actually think this way,’ people assume. ‘He just says it all to stay relevant.’
The outcome of his opinions are the same, whether they’re real or not.
That may well be true. Piers may well not believe the racist, sexist, and right-wing things he spouts. But actually, that doesn’t matter at all – because the outcome of his opinions are the same, whether they’re real or not.
When you spend years attacking a Black woman’s character on one of the nation’s most popular TV shows, when you write viral columns condemning various women of colour for a paper whose audience largely laps up the vitriol, the racism that isn’t just dog-whistled, but knowingly inflamed, causes enduring damage to those communities.
Then when he's accused of being racist himself, he feigns ignorance - playing the 'I don't see colour' card by implying that bringing race into the conversation is racist in and of itself. Yet we know, and he knows we know, that he's educated enough to see the impact of his words in the larger framework of a country that has systemic issues with racism. He see's the statistics about the increase of hate crimes since Brexit, the Home Office reports into crimes related to race and religion, the protests and public outcries every year. He knows Britain is a racist country, and he chooses to feed said racists fury every morning that he attacks another woman of colour for merely existing.
To dismiss Piers as a troll then, is to remove him from the character many assume he plays, as if the person doesn’t actually represent the views he spouts. It allows him to maintain his reputation as a journalist unafraid to take powerful people to task over bad behaviour, despite the fact he’s said so much that has caused real harm to countless people.
He might well be a troll, but he’s paid God knows how much to whip up hatred towards any woman who dares speak up about mental illness and he’ll continue to do so for as long as we dismiss him as an attention-seeker (ironic really, that he refers to Naomi as petulant when he himself uses the same skills as a toddler to keep his career alive).
He’s not just an attention seeker, he’s not just a troll, he actively incites hatred in one of the most popular tabloids in the UK. Piers shtick might be just that, but it shouldn’t be the reason he continues to get away with harming so many people.
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