Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will pick up a prestigious Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights award for fighting racial justice but the move has sparked criticism. The Duke and Duchess of Sussex are expected to attend the Ripple of Hope Award Gala in New York City, on Tuesday, December 6, 2022. Other recipients include Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and, posthumously, basketball player and civil rights icon Bill Russell, among others. 

However, the recognition of Harry and Meghan's philanthropic work through their Archewell Foundation has stirred controversy from some familiar and some less familiar quarters, including Kennedy's son. 

Opposition to Harry and Meghan Being Given Human Rights Award

Robert Kennedy Jr., who has been suspended from Instagram over his views on the coronavirus vaccine, spoke out against the move, but also said he thought it was a better choice than the decision to hand an award to Dr. Anthony Fauci in 2020.

"It's a bewildering choice but still an encouraging step up from 2020," Kennedy told the Daily Mail.

Professor David Nasaw, the author of a biography on RFK's father Joseph Kennedy, titled The Patriarch, asked what the couple had "done to merit this?"

Quoted by The Independent, he said: "I find it somewhere between sublimely ridiculous and blatantly ludicrous. It's absurd."

He added: "If you look at the people who have been awarded the Robert Kennedy prize in the past—Bill and Hillary Clinton, Nancy Pelosi, Bishop Desmond Tutu—and then you have to ask what are Harry and Meghan doing here? What in God's name have they done to merit this? What percentage of Harry and Meghan's wealth is going to worthy causes?"

And regular Meghan and Harry critic Angela Levin, who wrote Harry: A Biography of a Prince, asked: "Are they really up there with earlier award winners?"

She told the Daily Mail: "Whichever way you look at it, their alleged achievements seem fantasy laced with persuasion and who knows what else, rather than fact."

Royal biographer Robert Jobson, author of William at 40, told Newsweek it's customary at award ceremonies to seek recipients who will raise the profile of the ceremony.

"We know that when people get these things it's a way of getting people to the event. I personally can't see how they can be honoring them for their work when if you look at the accounts for Archewell it's hardly got going," Jobson said.

"To me, it's about getting people at the event and that's clearly what's happened. When they do these awards, you've got to hunt around to get people to collect them and what matters is you've got to work out how to sell tickets.

"You've got to make it worthwhile to raise money for the foundation. Without being too cynical, they look around for whose going to sell tickets, whose going to give them publicity. It doesn't necessarily go on lifetime achievement, as it should," he said. 

Reasons Why Harry and Meghan Given RFK Human Rights Award

The organization itself has said the decision was intended to honor the couple's work on racial justice and mental health.

Kerry Kennedy, president of Robert F. Kennedy Human Rights, said in an October press statement: "When The Duke and Duchess accepted our award laureate invitation back in March, we were thrilled. The couple has always stood out for their willingness to speak up and change the narrative on racial justice and mental health around the world.

"They embody the type of moral courage that my father once called the 'one essential, vital quality for those who seek to change a world that yields most painfully to change.'"

Beyond their famous Oprah Winfrey interview and its allegations of racism from an unnamed royal family member, Harry and Meghan called for Britain to confront its colonial past during a video call for the Queen's Commonwealth Trust in the summer of 2020.

Meghan wrote a New York Times essay about her experience of having a miscarriage in July 2020 and Harry teamed up with Oprah for a docuseries on mental health for Apple TV titled The Me You Can't See.  By Jack Royston, Newsweek