LONDON – She was married to the enthusiastic tribes of a gospel choir, her veil embroidered with the flowers of Britain’s former colonies, a rare statue among rows of white princes and princesses of the post-racial, immigrant society that some represented Britain .
And then that vision came apart.
Meghan’s report on racism in the royal family, which was delivered from a reed chair outside a mansion in California last week, opened more than just new wounds in Buckingham Palace. It also raised the question of whether the family and indeed the country were just as embracing for black people as her wedding in 2018 indicated they could be.
The revelations erupted over the so-called Commonwealth family, a group of largely non-white former colonies led by Queen Elizabeth II, who demanded that royal ties be revalued and that the British crown be completely abolished in Australia.
At home, among Britons who identified with Meghan and her son, Archie, as newcomers to a very white family, the interview had a different resonance, highlighting the hard limits of racial progress in the country.
For them, Meghan’s description of one or more of her in-laws about the potential color of Archie’s skin reminded her of the racism they also faced in their own family and abroad. The damaging call: mottled, half chaste. The muted chats about visits to family members’ villages. The cruel, disorienting questions from classmates and others: What are you?
Adam Hamdy, a London novelist, recalled that his white mother was denied by her family because she married his father, a black man.
“It really tickled me, the idea that there is a kind of ceiling for what one can achieve,” he said. ‘The idea that there’s someone who says I can not be a prince, that I can not be a princess, that there is an inherent flaw or defect due to the color of my skin. It’s deep, deeply offensive. ”
According to Meghan’s account, Archie may not become a prince. And Meghan, whose mother is an African-American and her father is a white woman, could not become the mirror image of a changing Britain she had imagined herself to be.
“I could never understand how it would not be considered an added benefit,” she told Oprah Winfrey, “and a reflection of today’s world.”
Since the interview aired, it has been analyzed in every way – for what it has revealed about the dance between the royals and the largely white, royal-obsessed British tabloid, and for its potential to undo much of the monarchy’s reconstruction work to make the fallout from the death of Princess Diana in 1997.
But among other things, the controversy over the interview was a particularly trans-Atlantic tug of war – between an American habit of talking bluntly about race and a British one talking about it, historians have said.
The interview was held in an American backyard, with one of the country’s most powerful black celebrities, and exposed British racial exposure to an American glamor – according to historians through decades of segregation and racial violence to cover up the less overt racist acts track. Britons sometimes pretend they are not there.
“In Britain, there is a very great silence around race that does not actually exist in the United States,” said Priyamvada Gopal, a professor of postcolonial studies at the University of Cambridge. ‘You could not have had a similar conversation on British television. There is no one with Oprah’s profile. And the idea of a talk show host sitting with a royal couple or anyone discussing race in detail – that’s not really conceivable in the UK. “
When Meghan married Harry, some black and two-sided Britons saw versions of themselves, and outsiders climbed the country’s most elite institution.
“At the time, it did not add to me that there would be a kind of setback,” said Armarni Lane, 25, the daughter of a black father and a white mother from Sheffield, England.
Now see Mrs. Lane the younger self as ‘naive’. She wrote on Twitter this week about the family of her white partner who speculated about her child’s skin color, as Harry’s family did about Archie’s. Then a family member sent her friend a message to object to what they considered a charge of racism.
“What I understood in the UK about racism is that there is a lot of gas exposure,” she said. Lane said. “It’s almost like you’re a black or mixed race in Britain, and you’re in a version of ‘The Truman Show,’ where you know something’s not right, but nobody wants to admit it.”
For other black Britons, Meghan’s rise was a source of discomfort. Would the monarchy use her to render support among black residents of the Commonwealth – itself a remnant of the British Empire, built on white conquest, exploitation and sovereignty over non-white peoples? Would she become a kind of squatter child for racial progress in Britain, a distraction from the royal family’s own history?
After the dissolution of the empire, Prince Philip, the family patriarch, asked an Aboriginal leader: ‘Are you still throwing spears at each other’, and a few years before that a British student in China warned that he ‘ with a sneaking eye would go home ‘if he stayed too long. Harry himself, as a young cadet at the Sandhurst Military Academy, used an ethnic abuse for a Pakistani fellow cadet.
Meghan did not wash the history of the British’s memories, but splashed 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, a professor of black studies at Birmingham City University.
But her accusations do not necessarily pose problems for white Britain’s ties to the royal family, an institution that draws in part on their nostalgia for the British imperial past, he added.
“It’s a symbol of whiteness – that’s why it’s popular,” Professor Andrews said. “It’s kind of brand.”
The Commonwealth was intended to recreate the empire as an alliance, and yet an equal partnership would mean leaders of former colonies would be the head of the organization, analysts said. Instead, the role is reserved for the Queen, an unelected white Briton.
And although some Britons saw Meghan as a possible bridge between the past and the future of the monarchy, the Windsors could not include her in the family for whatever reasons.
“The whole experience with Meghan shows the ambivalent relationship of the monarchy with the rediscovery of Britishness,” said Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, who wrote about the modernization of the institution.
Far from the royal palaces, Britain is still reinventing itself. As of 2011, almost one in ten people living in a couple in England and Wales was part of an inter-ethnic relationship. London neighborhoods are less separated than many cities in the United States. Elements of other cultures are slowly being incorporated into British identity.
Not everyone is happy with that transition; one of the calls for Brexit was the promise to restrict immigration.
The fact that the worst of the empire’s racial violence was ‘shot down’ to the colonies – rather than being administered on its own soil, as in the United States – hindered a richer conversation about race, historians said.
Tariq Jenner, a doctor in the emergency, said the British Empire had almost no schooling.
“We are taught about the war of the roses and the wives of Henry VIII,” he said. “And then nothing happened and Britain did the industrial revolution, beat the Nazis and Churchill saved everything.”
The National Health Service was not exempted from the same settlement that hit the royal family. Non-white staff members, often employed in risky work, make up one-fifth of the workforce, but two-thirds of deaths during the pandemic.
Senior leaders are overwhelmingly white, a phenomenon formerly described as the “snow-white peaks of the NHS,” and non-white staff members tend to institute disciplinary proceedings.
Like the royal family, the British media also often seemed to many black Britons as being made for a white audience. This week, television host wondered aloud why the question of Archie’s skin was different from speculating about a white baby’s hair.
Izabelle Lee, 23, said the coverage has an effect. She is an actress born to a white British mother and a black Trinidadian father and said articles keep her white grandparents busy with the fear of illegal migrants.
She no longer talks to them. When she was 8, her white grandmother said she looked like a golliwog, a racist caricature, which made her mother furious. When she saw Meghan talking this week, Lee said she recognized the look in her mother’s eyes when she talked about how family members reacted to her marrying a black man.
“I think she felt an injustice and a tension,” Ms Lee said of her mother, “that if she had a child with a white man, she would not have felt it.”