LONDON – She was married to the lively strains of a gospel choir, her veil embroidered with flowers from the former colonies of Great Britain, a rare image among rows of white princes and princesses in the post-racial immigrant society that some imagined it to be. Britain.
And then that vision fell apart at the seams.
Meghan’s account of racism in the royal family, made last week from a wicker chair outside a California mansion, did more than open new wounds at Buckingham Palace. It also questioned whether the family and, in fact, the country were as receptive to blacks as their 2018 wedding had signaled they could be.
The revelations spread to the so-called Commonwealth family, a group of largely non-white former colonies headed by Queen Elizabeth II, leading to calls for a reassessment of royal ties and, in Australia, to abandon the British crown altogether.
At home, among the British who identified with Meghan and her son, Archie, biracial newcomers in a very white family, the interview had a different resonance, highlighting the rigid limits of the country’s racial progress.
For them, Meghan’s description of one or more of her in-laws concerned about the potential color of Archie’s skin recalled the racism they also faced within their own families and outside. Harmful cursing: mottled, mestizo. The hushed talk about visiting relatives’ villages. The brutal and disorienting questions from classmates and others: What are you?
Adam Hamdy, a London novelist, recalls that his white mother was rejected by the family for marrying his father, a black man.
“It really hit me in the head that there is some kind of limit to what you can achieve,” he said. “The idea that there is someone who says that I cannot be a prince, that I cannot be a princess, that there is some inherent flaw or defect because of the color of my skin. It is deeply offensive. “
In Meghan’s narrative, Archie was not allowed to become a prince. And Meghan, whose mother is an African American and white father, could not become the mirror image of a changing Britain she imagined.
“I was never able to understand how this would not be seen as an added benefit,” she told Oprah Winfrey, “and a reflection of today’s world.”
Since the interview was broadcast, it has been dissected in every way – for what it revealed about the dance between royalty and British tabloids obsessed with royalty, and for its potential to undo much of the monarchy’s reconstruction work the consequences of the death of the Princess Diana in 1997.
But, among other things, the controversy over the interview was a particularly transatlantic tug of war – between the American habit of talking openly about race and the British habit of covering it up, historians said.
Held in an American backyard, with one of the most powerful black celebrities in the country, the interview exposed British race negotiations to an American brilliance – which historians say has been enhanced by decades of segregation and racial violence to detect less open racist acts that the British sometimes pretend they’re not there.
“There is, in Britain, a very great silence about the race that, in fact, does not exist in the United States,” said Priyamvada Gopal, professor of post-colonial studies at the University of Cambridge. “You couldn’t have had a comparable conversation on prime time on UK television. There is no one with Oprah’s profile. And the idea of a talk show host sitting down with a real couple or anyone and arguing at length about race – this is not really imaginable in the UK ”
When Meghan married Harry, some black and biracial Britons saw versions of themselves, strangers climbing the country’s elite institution.
“It didn’t occur to me at the time that there was going to be any kind of negative reaction,” said Armarni Lane, 25, the daughter of a black father and a white mother from Sheffield, England.
Now, Ms. Lane sees this younger self as “naive”. She wrote on Twitter this week about her white partner’s family speculating about her son’s skin tone, just as Harry’s family did about Archie’s. Then, a relative sent a message to the partner to contest what they considered an accusation of racism.
“What I started to understand about racism in the UK is that there are a lot of spotlights,” said Lane. “It’s almost as if, being black or half-breed in Britain, you are on a version of ‘The Truman Show’, where you know something is not right, but nobody wants to admit it.”
For other black Britons, Meghan’s rise had been a source of discomfort. Would the monarchy use it to gain support among black residents of the Commonwealth – itself a remnant of the British Empire, built on conquest, exploitation and white sovereignty over non-white people? Would she become a sort of poster boy for racial progress in Britain, a departure from the royal family’s own history?
Well after the dissolution of the empire, Prince Philip, the patriarch of the family, asked an Aboriginal leader “do you still throw spears at each other”, and a few years earlier warned a British student in China that he “would return home with his eyes tight “if he stayed too long. Harry himself, as a young cadet at the Sandhurst military academy, used ethnic slander for a fellow Pakistani cadet.
Far from washing away this history of British memories, Meghan spread it on the front pages.
“Black Britain probably feels much more connected to Meghan Markle today than it did three years ago,” said Kehinde Andrews, professor of Black Studies at Birmingham City University.
But his accusations don’t necessarily mean trouble for Britain’s white ties to the royal family, an institution that draws its appeal, in part, from nostalgia for Britain’s imperial past, he added.
“It is a symbol of whiteness – that is why it is popular,” said Professor Andrews. “It is a kind of brand.”
The Commonwealth’s aim was to reshape the empire as an alliance, but an egalitarian partnership would mean allowing former colony leaders to head the organization, analysts said. Instead, that role is reserved for the queen, an unelected white British woman.
And while some Britons see Meghan as a potential bridge between the monarchy’s past and future, the Windsors were unable – for whatever reason – to absorb her into the family.
“The whole experience with Meghan shows the ambivalent relationship of the monarchy with the reinvention of Britishism,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who wrote about the modernization of the institution.
Away from royal palaces, Britain is reinventing itself. In 2011, almost one in 10 people who lived with a couple in England and Wales was part of an interethnic relationship. London’s neighborhoods are less segregated than many cities in the United States. Elements from other cultures are slowly being absorbed by British identity.
Not everyone is satisfied with this transition; one of Brexit’s pleas was the promise to limit immigration.
But the fact that the worst of the empire’s racial violence was “marginalized” in the colonies – rather than inflicted on its own soil, as in the United States – inhibited a richer conversation about race, historians said.
Tariq Jenner, an emergency room physician, said the British Empire hardly influenced his schooling.
“We are taught about the War of the Roses and the wives of Henry VIII,” he said. “And then nothing happened and Britain made the industrial revolution, defeated the Nazis and Churchill saved everything.”
The National Health Service did not exempt itself from the same calculation that affected the royal family. Non-white team members, often taken on risky jobs, make up one-fifth of the workforce, but two-thirds of deaths during the pandemic.
Senior leaders are predominantly white, a phenomenon previously described as the “snow-white peaks of the NHS”, and non-white employees are more likely to enter disciplinary proceedings.
Like the royal family, the British media also often looks to many black Britons that it was made for a white audience. This week, television presenters I wondered out loud why asking about Archie’s skin was any different than speculating about a white baby’s hair.
Izabelle Lee, 23, said the coverage had an effect. Actress, daughter of a white British mother and black father from Trinidad, she said articles that fueled the fear of illegal immigrants worried her white grandparents.
She doesn’t talk to them anymore. When she was 8, her white grandmother said that she looked like a golliwog, a racist caricature, infuriating her mother. Watching Meghan speak this week, Ms. Lee said she recognized the look in her mother’s eyes when she talked about how relatives reacted to her marriage to a black man.
“I think she felt an injustice and tension,” said Lee of his mother, “that if she had a child with a white man, she would be meaningless.”