Meghan: A Hollywood Princess(2)
(Meghan might note that while the palace has ordered her website, The Tig, which contained intelligent and well-written essays about gender equality and race, to be scrubbed from the internet, videos of her very unprincesslike behavior remain for all to see.)
While Meghan is not the first mixed-race woman to marry into European royalty—that honor goes to Panamanian-born Angela Brown, now Princess Angela of the tiny but wealthy country of Liechtenstein—she is the first divorced biracial American to take her place in the House of Windsor.
Though race has aroused plenty of debate in her own country—inevitably because of America’s past as a nation practicing slavery and segregation—race relations have been largely ignored in conjunction with the royal family.
Ironically, when the engagement was announced in November 2017, moviegoers in America and Britain were enjoying Victoria and Abdul, the story of Queen Victoria’s friendship with an Indian attendant Abdul Karim. His presence at court excited so much animosity that when the queen died in 1901, her successor, King Edward VII, personally supervised his eviction and deportation back to India. Victoria’s daughter Beatrice erased all references to Karim in her mother’s voluminous diaries. As historian Carolly Erickson observes in Her Little Majesty, “For a dark-skinned Indian to be put very nearly on a level with the queen’s white servants was all but intolerable, for him to eat at the same table with them, to share in their daily lives was viewed as an outrage.”
Though the present queen does not, as author Penny Junor argues, recognize color, only 6 percent of the 1,100 people employed by the palace are from ethnic minorities, and only around thirty are in senior positions. While this ethnic imbalance is also reflected in the senior ranks of the civil service, it has been argued that the royal family has missed an opportunity to take the lead on race.
It is a subject that Meghan has not shied away from discussing, and she will already be well aware that people of color do not feature noticeably inside the palace. Perhaps it is an issue she may decide to involve herself in after she settles into royal life.
As Trevor Phillips, former head of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, notes, the way in which Meghan handles herself will send out an important message to minorities. “It is a very big deal that she has talked of her pride in her ethnicity. For people of colour that will be seen as a very positive, modern approach and immensely welcome.”
Not only is she part of the discussion about race in Britain, but her racial background informs attitudes in the US. The biracial soon-to-be-royal is considered part of the Loving generation, the cohort that gets its name from the Virginia couple Richard and Mildred Loving, who were arrested in 1958 and put in jail for the crime of miscegenation. Until the 1967 Supreme court judgment in Loving v. Virginia, interracial marriage was against the law in some states.
In the 1970s there were about 65,000 black and white married couples in the United States. By the 1980s, a little over a decade after the Loving ruling, that number had doubled to 120,000. A significant jump, but one has to keep in mind that the population was around 240 million at the time.
With a white Republican father and a black Democrat mother, Meghan has found herself at the center of an active discussion about the place of mixed-race individuals in society. Thus, Meghan’s narrative is that of a woman trying to find herself not just as a woman but to define her place in society, a world where she is seen as neither black nor white.
Looking to the future, she will also have to define herself as part of the far smaller world of royalty.
Even though Meghan is very much her own woman, it is interesting that those who taught her or knew her spontaneously mention the D-word in the same breath as Meghan. Comparisons with Diana are inevitable; Meghan’s secret solo visit in February 2018 to comfort the survivors of the Grenfell Tower inferno in Kensington, West London, revives memories of Diana’s trips to the homeless on London’s South Bank. Her social work visiting AIDS patients, the homeless, and those on their last lonely journey was therapeutic, as healing for her as it was for those she comforted.
While Meghan is empathetic, certainly, but also self-possessed, sophisticated, poised, and charismatic. She is a woman who is camera-ready, not camera-shy.
Long before Prince Harry was mentioned in conjunction with Meghan, her alma mater, Immaculate Heart in Los Angeles, regularly screened the 2015 speech she made at the United Nations Women conference on gender equality as inspiration for the current generation of female students.
It is said that to be an effective congressman, member of Parliament, or president, it is preferable to have enjoyed a successful career outside the political world so that when you walk into the chamber or the White House, it is not so intimidating. This is where Meghan finds herself. She has arrived at the gates of the palace fully formed: a successful actor, a popular blogger, and an acknowledged humanitarian.
She can boast a bloodline of slaves and kings, servants and swordsmen. Hers has been a remarkable journey, a journey that began—where else—the city of dreams, Los Angeles.
1
In Search of Wisdom
For years she was troubled by a nagging question at the back of her mind: Where does my family come from, what is my history? For Rachel Meghan Markle—known as “Bud” and “Flower” by her family—it was an endlessly perplexing issue. The fact that her mother, Doria Ragland, was an African American and her father, Thomas Wayne Markle, was a white Pennsylvanian only added to the confusion.