Meghan Markle’s identity as a ‘Black’ woman became ‘more focused’ after she started dating Prince Harry

Meghan Markle is making use of her platform — Spotify podcast ‘Archetypes‘ — to share her experience as a member of the UK royal family and a former senior royal member of the institution, with her fans and followers from around the world, especially women.
In the second episode of the podcast, titled ‘The Duality of Diva‘, the Duchess of Sussex discussed many hard-hitting points with her guest Mariah Carey, an American singer-songwriter. The two talked about, among other things, their mixed-race identities and what it means to be a light-skinned Black person.
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Meghan is the daughter of Thomas Markle and Doria Ragland, and she shared that people became fixated on her race and ethnic background ever since she started dating Prince Harry, the son of Prince Charles and Princess Diana, whom she went on to marry in 2018 and now has two children with.

The duchess revealed that her courtship period with the UK royal made her realise, for the first time, that she was a Black woman, and that people saw her as one.

At one point during the conversation, she told the celebrated singer, “I think for us, it’s so different because we’re light-skinned. You’re not treated as a Black woman. You’re not treated as a white woman. You sort of fit in-between.”

“I mean, if there’s any time in my life that it’s been more focused on my race, it’s only once I started dating my husband,” the duchess continued, adding, “Then I started to understand what it was like to be treated like a Black woman; because, up until then, I had been treated like a mixed woman. And things really shifted.”

Last year, during the Sussexes’ ‘explosive’ tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey, they had discussed a crucial story pertaining to their first-born son Archie’s skin colour, which was purportedly discussed within the royal institution prior to his birth.

The couple had told the television host that when Meghan was pregnant, there were talks about “how dark” the colour of Archie Harrison’s skin would be, since Meghan is a woman of colour. “In the months when I was pregnant, all around the same time, so we have in tandem the conversation of he [Archie] won’t be given security, he’s not going to be given a title, and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born,” the duchess had said.

In her previous Archetypes podcast episode with Serena Williams, Meghan had also said that she would often feel a “negative connotation” to the word “ambitious” while dating Prince Harry. “…apparently, ‘ambition’ is a terrible, terrible thing, for a woman that is — according to some. So, since I’ve felt the negativity behind it, it is really hard to un-feel it. I can’t unsee it, either, in the millions of girls and women who make themselves smaller, so much smaller, on a regular basis,” she had said.
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