Radio Host Fired Over Racist Tweet About Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s Baby

Prince Harry and California native Meghan Markle, the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, welcomed the arrival of their first child, Archie Harrison Mountbatten-Windsor, on Monday.

The same day the proud parents posed for photos with their son at St. George’s Hall in Windsor Castle, where they had their wedding reception, a longtime radio host decided to make a racist joke about the infant.

Danny Baker, who had a weekly show on BBC Radio 5 Live, posted on Wednesday an image on Twitter of a couple holding hands with a chimpanzee and the caption: “Royal baby leaves hospital.”

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle
Source: Twitter

Markle’s mother, baby Archie’s grandmother, Doria Ragland, is African American.

“My dad is Caucasian and my mom is African American. I’m half Black and half white,” Markle wrote in a column for ELLE magazine in 2015.

After backlash, Baker said in a tweet, later that day, “Once again. Sincere apologies for the stupid unthinking gag pic earlier. Was supposed to be [a] joke about Royals vs circus animals in posh clothes but interpreted as about monkeys & race.”

He tweeted on Thursday: “Enormous mistake, for sure. Grotesque. Anyway, here’s to ya Archie, Sorry mate.”

The racist post has since been deleted, and so has Baker’s job.

“This was a serious error of judgment and goes against the values we as a station aim to embody. Danny’s a brilliant broadcaster but will no longer be presenting a weekly show with us,” a spokesperson from the BBC said on Thursday.

When the couple began dating in 2016, Kensington Palace had to release a statement demanding the media to stop articles with “racist undertones.”

Baker’s terrible Twitter post isn’t the first time the union of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry was mocked on social media by racists.

Related Story: Racist Tweet About Meghan Markle and Cheddar Man Gets GOP Contender Banned

Last year, The Natural History Museum in London released images of Cheddar Man, a human hunter-gatherer who lived in Britain about 10,000 years ago. DNA analysis found he had a very dark to Black complexion, dark hair and blue eyes — Britons originate from Africans.

Former Wisconsin GOP congressional candidate Paul Nehlen rejected the scientific analysis and chose to mock Markle, then the fiancée of Prince Harry, in a tweet. It got him permanently suspended from Twitter. And this month, he was banned from Facebook for his racist rhetoric.

Related Story: The Royal Wedding Ceremony Included the African-American Experience

Harry, younger son of heir-to-the-throne Prince Charles, and Markle, a California native, married on May 19, 2018.

From a sermon by the first Black leader of the Episcopal Church in the United States to a soul-stirring gospel choir, it was clear that Markle chose to recognize her African-American heritage during the wedding ceremony.

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