When Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex sat down with Oprah Winfrey, she was a David facing off against a Goliath, the British monarchy. Newly freed from a royal agreement to hold her tongue, she was anxious to regain her voice. And she did, in a quiet, measured manner that along the way released a Kraken. She appeared earnest, although because she’s an actress, any certainty about her sincerity is speculative. 

It did seem curiously naive that Meg didn’t Google Harry because actresses need to be careful about these things. But then again, maybe it’s not necessary for a prince. As for the royal family, most Americans know very little about them except the pomp and circumstance in news clips. As a busy Afro-American actress, there’s no reason why the British monarchy would attract her interest. Actors are often not particularly well educated, not simply because many drop out of school but also because their focus is on the craft of entertainment, not history or current events. Entertainers are often assumed to have a level of sophistication that is more a product of their image than their daily lives. Meg was busy filming her TV series “Suits” with the attendant publicity obligations. Add in the fog of new love, it’s only in retrospect that a bit of preparation seems like it would have been a good idea. The kind of stuff she needed to know can’t be found on Google.

Of course, once they were engaged, she might have dug deeper, and perhaps she did, but details about the royals are sparse beyond the superficial. It was on Harry to fill in the important bits. Maybe the fear of being turned down tempered his early disclosures. After she accepted was when the real orientation should have started. For instance, she had no reason to know the British national anthem if she’d had no occasion to sing it? How many Americans do? Still, his ignorance strains credibility a bit since he must have had run-ins with the Firm in the past over his bachelor exploits exposed in the tabloids. 

The Duchess chose her words carefully, in an attempt to shield herself, the couple and the royal family. Oprah’s reaction to the bombshell about the concern over Archie’s skin color was not the surprise that much of the press assumed. She’s lived enough life to have expected the question. No, Oprah’s shock was that Meg said it out loud so nakedly, a shock magnified by Oprah’s considerable acting chops. Yes it came with considerable softening, not the bare worry that he would look Black, but an inquiry about complexion, kind of like one would think about Harry’s anomalous red hair. Given Meg’s origins, it’s likely that her parents faced similar questions which sprung from the exact same origins. (This is an experience that I share.) 

But the significance of the disclosure was important in exposing the relentlessness of the racially biased attacks, not simply from without by the press but from within the family and the Firm. None of those entities is sympathetic or kind. If “The Crown” is to be believed, this is an institutional order that quietly erased two family members with genetic handicaps from their tree, hiding them away in a mental institution.

Always disposed to a negative perspective, the press accused the couple of not naming the person(s) involved in the “complexion discussion” so the press could not investigate it. And yet it was very clear from Harry’s remarks that it was to protect them from the public shaming that would reverberate across the Commonwealth most importantly, if not in the US and the world in general. This is after all, his family for better or worse. Even in the distance that royal parents maintain from their children, children love their parents no matter what. Often they are driven into bizarre behaviors to elicit some expression of parental love. Here too, “The Crown” weaves some nifty tales.

Harry and Meg should probably spend more time catching up on episodes of “The Crown”. The series has drawn a clear picture of Queen Elizabeth’s battles between duty and her personal feelings. She has acted to do what she thought would sustain the monarchy. She drove her sister to alcoholism and numerous unhealthy romantic relationships. She arranged for Charles’ love Camilla to marry someone else and then forced him to marry Diana, setting up the marriage for 3 that crushed Diana. All of these maneuvers were designed to keep the royal entourage in their proper place. That Elizabeth had the stones to make these decisions was set in sharp contrast with her uncle Edward VIII who pursued the personal, i.e., Mrs Wallace, over the interest of the crown. When the Firm pushed back against his intentions to marry, he wanted to change the institution. But he lost that battle big time and so jumped ship. That’s how Elizabeth eventually came to the throne.

Elizabeth has wanted to change nothing, but she was dragged into beginning an era when the royal family became available to the regular public, sending the family on rounds of official appearances after a wave of unpopularity threatened the institution. She responded to a tsunami of grief over Princess Di’s death with a public funeral when she wanted to ignore the death of a traitor to the family, yet another follower of the personal over duty to the crown.

Harry could have seen his own oppressive trap laid bare in “The Crown” as well. An accident of birth that left him outside the line of succession made his escape possible. The centuries-old pomp and circumstance, the protocols, the traditions are the trap, outside the control of any one player, even the reigning monarch. Gone are the halcyon days of Henry VIII when the monarch actually controlled the fate of the nation. Now the monarch is a figurehead, commanding legions of men and women decked out in centuries-old costumes for rituals of state. Everything related to the queen like how to approach, how to address and how to leave the room is controlled by protocols not of the queen’s making but which she relishes. The monarchy is an institution that’s built to last, as it has, for centuries despite momentous historical changes. But Harry’s father Charles and brother William are locked in. Perhaps Charles has made his peace in his decades-long wait to assume the throne, having been allowed to finally marry his beloved Camilla and see her public acceptance, no matter how tepid. 

“The Crown” nailed one other important piece, the role of the press, all of it, not just the tabloids. The press is the window into the monarchy and the family is acutely aware how much their image and popularity is dependent on them. The press is the only interface the public has with the menagerie of characters who, after all, are a gaggle of ne’er-do-wells who contribute nothing to the country’s well being. They sit around, eat, drink, hop in and out of numerous beds, party, fund raise for charities, cut a few ribbons and put on a public face. Their exploits come with an enormous price tag, which is why they have to at least be entertaining. The British public hungers for juicy bits of gossip made all the more salacious by the tabloid press. It’s like watching the Kardashians, except the Brits’ taxes are floating their bills and the Kardashians are free. They want something back for their cash. 

The tabloids like to get ugly, because ugly sells. So the royals have to smooze them and titillate them with harmless tips. They also have to treat their royal staff right, least they sell out to the very generous tabloids. But all those sumptuous dinners can’t buy compassion or loyalty. It’s like feeding a pack of wolves and hoping they won’t get hungry again. 

Okay, “The Crown” is fiction. It’s well researched and based on actual events, but the creators weren’t in the rooms. They didn’t hear any of those conversations that fill the dialogue in their scripts. But they seem to have captured the essence of the lives of a pampered, self-obsessed nobility, an anachronism in and of itself, with nothing to do except what they call “public service”. On the other hand, what do we really know? Except that the couple’s experience seems to mirror what’s on the small screen. 

The British press consistently refer to Meg as biracial, a not so subtle reminder that Meghan is a product of “racial mixing”, a cardinal sin in the eyes of many concerned with separation by skin color. This trope from the very beginning of white superiority propaganda is deeply embedded in the brain’s neural networks that coalesce into implicit racial bias. In the US, with its one drop rule, Markle is simply Black. Meg committed another cardinal sin, not knowing her “place”. Black people are supposed to understand their subordinated position and give way to the dominant white caste. Place is acknowledged by both attitude and deferential self-censorship. But she just wouldn’t shut up, insisting on talking about justice and the circumstances of women around the world, too “political” for a royal. For the Brits, class adds another layer to status in society. Like in the US, a commoner retains more status than a darker skinned person but both must continue to defer to the aristocracy. A commoner with the privilege of entry into the royal family is supposed to count their blessings, look decorative and keep their mouth shut. 

The queen’s official response stated that the royal family was saddened and would address the questions raised by Markle within the family. Boom! She immediately shut down any discussion of racism. The family, raised in a bubble that has no real interaction with any normal Britons, has literally no idea of the racism that pervades their subjects. They are, after all, descendants of the purveyors of the big lie, that of the inferiority of people of color, on which the Empire is based. They’ve seen no reason to reconsider the ideas in which they believe so deeply. They are the end of a line of monarchs who believe in the God given right of Britons to subjugate the rest of the world and extract the wealth from it for the country’s own growth. The Queen continues to believe in her right to reign over the people of color that populate the countries that remain in the Commonwealth, the remains of their tattered empire reduced by Britain’s fall from global significance. Emigres from Commonwealth countries have felt the sting of imperial white supremacy as they’ve come to Britain’s shore, where whites refuse to examine their attitudes or their historic role in the oppression of people of color. 

The entire royal frame of reference renders the family incapable of understanding racial prejudice. They literally can’t see it. It’s as invisible as coronavirus. Their lives would have to be cracked open, like Harry’s, in order for them to begin to dig into their history. And they can’t look at something they can’t see. The cerebral gyri are neatly twisted upon themselves but the mental paradigms that govern the ways our minds work would have to be turned inside out for that kind of inquiry. This is not something that people between 60 and 80 like Prince Charles and the monarch, raised in a lifetime bubble akin to that of the MAGA cult, can do. And so the royal family will further bury their heads in the sand, stiffen their upper lip, batten down the hatches and wait for the storm to blow over as it always has. Because they can’t see that they’ve done anything wrong. 

This is not the missed opportunity to confront racism that the American press wants to pretend it is. There isn’t even a ripple of that in the British press. Queen Elizabeth is not the person who can lead or even participate in discussions of race in the UK or the Commonwealth. Prince William’s “my family is not racist” response to  a question from the press is a good example. First of all, it’s a stupid question. No one, not even the late George Wallace, ever answers yes. Any automatic response that claims a white individual is not a racist is disingenuous. Both the question and the answer demonstrate a complete misunderstanding of the many faces of racism. As premiere representatives of British institutions, the family can’t be anything but. Although the British tend not to be copious conversationalists, there are no doubt millions of microaggressions scattered throughout the royal families’ lives, of which they are probably blithely ignorant. That is in the face of their very limited exposure to people of color. And without even considering their innate sense of superiority.

Black British activists have been beating their drum for a long time and no one in the government has listened. This may be an issue that the younger generation can tackle, but the time has not come yet in the country as a whole and nothing the Queen or Harry can say will jump start a reckoning. Our hearts and support go out to the UK Afro- and Caribbean communities in their struggle against the national deafness, but we are in a period of retrenchment of our own here. 

Perhaps, the couple’s ironic flight to the US is an indication of their desperation, for Meg knows all too well that racial animus is alive and well and now more explicitly expressed in her country.  Celebrity combined with a security detail and an entourage of assistants provides some shield (she is unlikely to be stopped by a cop for a broken taillight), but the editorial frame of the media can be no less relentless even if it is more subtle. However, the crushing influence of a titled nobility that sits atop a rigid class system is absent here, allowing space for the worship of celebrities, regardless of color, as nobility if not royalty. In fact, Canada, their first choice, was a better one, not because it is a Commonwealth nation, but because their racial antipathies tend to be directed toward citizens of First Nations rather than the tiny Black community, 3.5% by 2016 census data. On the other hand, there might be a residue of loyalty to the Queen that would have tainted their residence there even as murmurs about leaving the Commonwealth are spreading there in the wake of the whole affair.

Royal watchers have speculated that most members of the royal family didn’t watch the interview, an activity they consider beneath them. For them, it’s part of a media circus that is reminiscent of the disruption wrought by Princess Di. Their concern is not really what happened, but how they can protect themselves, i.e., the cover-up. They’ve plucked out the key words forbidden for them to respond to (oops to William’s faux pas) and garnered deflection strategies outside silence,  i.e. Meghan’s cruelty to the royal staff.  

The very fact that they announced an investigation of Meghan as a staff bully to head off any negative publicity before the interview speaks volumes about the likelihood that any investigation into how the Firm dealt with the duchess’s charges will happen. The fact that her pleas for psychiatric support for suicidal ideation, a life threatening emergency, went ignored should assume a high priority. If the Firm, with little interest in the individual person that is passing through in the long arc, is to spearhead that investigation, it will die a quiet death. It’s concern is the maintenance of the institution apart from any individual cog particularly when they’ve escaped their control.

In truth, the complaints from the staff themselves are probably another manifestation of racial animus within the household staff. The diversity of the staff, a place where jobs are handed down, raises the question of the lens through which the complaints will be viewed. As for the commoners who make up the staff, no doubt they were affronted by their new duties to serve a confident Black woman who wasn’t cowed by the privilege of being let into the royal family. We know that whites interpret the exact same behaviors differently when they come from the dark skinned rather than people who look like them. It’s highly likely that they saw that stereotypical angry Black woman, a level of presumptiveness they would have found hard to stomach. And from an American divorcee to boot. This stereotypical temptress, a Black Jezebel, mesmerized their poor Harry to force her way into their paradise. Needless to say the duchess will be found guilty, if not in the findings themselves, then in the tabloid press. The narrative will go something like, “if you think she’s an innocent, look how mean she was to people [like you]. If she can do that, can you even trust that she was suicidal? Can you trust anything she says?” She’ll be done and dusted. No stone will be left unturned to vilify her person because the words of the vilified can be ignored. Voila! “What racism, what is that?” Britons will continue to live in their cozy national coma. Their love-hate fascination with the royal family, their national treasure, will go on and on or at least the Prince of Wales hopes it will extend to his coronation if not beyond. Britons love Elizabeth; they hate Charles, simply because he was mean to a canonized Diana.

But Meghan is not Princess Di. She was one of them; Meghan is not. And Brits can’t get over her brown skin. Harry thinks only the tabloids are racist, but he’s wrong about that. After all, his experience with real people is pretty limited. He admitted during the interview that his wokeness mostly came from the couple’s collision with the tabloids, his family and the Firm. He must have seen plenty of it in his military experience in Afghanistan, but perhaps he hasn’t reprocessed it yet in light of his new reality.

Harry doesn’t want to believe that his family is racially biased either. For him to understand that will require him to delve into his upbringing and education and to flip flop on British imperialism, an enormous task for any individual. Still, the question why his wife was hung out to dry with the British tabloids has to be asked. As Meg put it, why would the Firm choose to lie about her while correcting the record about other family members? Could it have been to provide Meghan as chum to distract away from the Prince Andrew debacle. Andrew is a perfect example of “pulling back from the public” to let the storm blow over. And yet, shouldn’t the public remain outraged over the presence of a pedophile in the royal family or is it simply tolerance of the many vices within the monarchy over the centuries. No doubt, Andrew is not the first. Our present age of enlightenment has been exposed as a fraud once again.

Or maybe, despite the Queen’s personal feelings for the Duchess, the Firm felt she was the one who didn’t belong and just like Diana, wanted the wrath of the nation and the tabloids to wash over her. The Firm was successful in their efforts with the tabloids then but instead of wrath, the nation embraced Di as “the peoples’ princess”. But as the essence of British imperial racism, it calculated correctly in the case of Meghan, particularly among elderly residents of the UK, the Queen’s staunchest supporters who have fond memories of their glorious empire. Those memories are the counterweight to their feelings of national and personal powerlessness that precipitated Brexit and now cloud their days as pensioners.   

The Black community watch the press coverage and recognize its racist roots. Those in mixed marriages instantly recognized the comments about Archie’s complexion because it was part of their experience too.

The Brits will rally around their queen. Meg insulted her, headlines cried, so she’s toast, except within the Black community. They love her and they love Harry for loving her. They saw themselves in her and hoped that her presence heralded a new day for the monarchy and possibly for them. The ripple of the BlackLivesMatter movement suggested that finally, the country might hear them and come to see their plight. Those in mixed marriages instantly recognized the comments about Archie’s complexion because it was part of their experience too. They’ve watched the press coverage and recognize its racist roots; they haven’t been fooled by the volley of superficial denials. The comparisons with Kate Middleton are particularly revealing; same behavior, radically different interpretations. 

One royal watcher, Peter Westmacott, interviewed by Christiane Amanpour tried to dismiss the concerns over Archie as an expression of unconscious bias that meant no harm. He’s a little foggy on what racism is and how it manifests. Implicit bias is racism and it is never harmless. Intention has nothing to do with it, since implicit bias is unconscious. In contrast, explicit racial bias, like that of the British press is very conscious and all too intentional. In either case, the hurt is always real. In Archie’s case, it went beyond a naive remark. His mother determined his place within the royal family, not because of her person but the color of her skin. No princely title, no protection detail, not because of protocols, but because the queen had decided to change the protocols. 

Meghan’s presence was a boost with residents across the Commonwealth as well. She pointed out during the interview that if Archie had a light brown face, it would change how Commonwealth residents would view the monarchy. But that was not an advantage to the monarchy, uncomfortable about change, because their presence in the Commonwealth is the embodiment of their whiteness and tan skin would upset the balance of power. That distinction is precisely why Meg could never think like a royal. The interview has rekindled interest in some Commonwealth countries to follow the Duke and Duchess out of the realm. Caribbean Islanders and Africans are asking themselves why shouldn’t their titular head of state be one of their own, not a reminder of a colonial past laced with bad memories of forced subservience.

The tabloids are well versed in British racism. Many of those attitudes abound in their newsrooms, where Black faces are at best a rarity if present at all. They are masters at focusing, framing and reflecting English racism back on itself. Rupert Murdoch is a magician at shaping public opinion and recycling it. But he didn’t create the deep seated racism that has permeated Britain forever. Remember, these are the same people who thought the Irish were a different race, lower than the dirt they planted their potatoes in. And then there’s the whole Brexit thing, sold to the public through anti-European rhetoric prominently against Eastern Europeans. Brits have been reluctant to roll out the welcome mat to others, preferring instead to invade other countries rather than welcome their natives onto their own shores. Maybe it’s an island thing.

The British tabloids will never let up. If the couple is to make their way in the world, capitalizing on their fame and Meg’s connections in the entertainment industry, they will have to maintain a high public profile. Every time they stick their heads out, the tabloids will come hunting and they’ll be hostile, like sharks circling in the water. The couple can try to shape their narrative, and outside Harry’s home country, they may have some success. Americans have no love for the monarchy; they mostly just enjoy the big spectacles. At the same time, the couple will need to harness the American eye that first came to know them as part of royalty in order to make a living. They’ll have to compete with a crap load of other celebrities, from Instagram influencers to Oprah. 

I empathize with Meghan because of our common ancestry and the burden it brings with it. She was blindsided by vicious racist behaviors that she never imagined and further devastated by a monarchy that refused to have her back. She seemed genuinely rocked emotionally by that betrayal as was Harry, their disappointment repeated several times during the interview. And Harry who is a newcomer to the venomous bites of anti-Black racism is only discovering its many faces and flavors. All that in the midst of trying to reckon with the generational trauma of the paparazzi and tabloid “reporters” that killed his mother, not to mention the parallels with his mother’s treatment by his family members and the Firm. I feel an emotional connection to them as an interracial couple having travelled that path myself. Neither had the parental guidance as children that would help them cope with their life together on the huge world stage. They have the resources to survive economically which should buy them the psychological support they need. I have to root for them, the way a parent roots for a child. But they’ll be alright, whether I do or not.

From the Equal Justice Initiative calendar 2021

During the week of March 14, 2015, protestors march after University of Oklahoma’s Sigma Alpha Epsilon fraternity is taped singing a song that includes the n-word and “You can hang him from a tree, but he’ll never sign with me.”