Sunday night’s primetime interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle was one for the ages. Oprah Winfrey didn’t disappoint in her fierce interviewing of the royal couple on CBS. For two hours, 17.1 million viewers got a front-row seat at the rollercoaster marriage of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, as their fairytale wedding turned into a hierarchical racist nightmare.
The couple, now claiming to have been forced out of the royal family due to lack of security, dropped hints that racism surrounding their high-profile marriage was the root cause of their abrupt departure. The only problem with the entire interview was getting them to actually confirm, not just imply, that race was behind all of this madness.
I was glued to the screen as Oprah, a queen of media in her own right, pressed Meghan and Harry on stating the obvious for the rest of us. Meghan had spent nearly an hour tip-toeing on what many people, especially Black viewers, were waiting on her to confirm.
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It wouldn’t be until 40 minutes into the interview that we finally began to hear the world “race” actually uttered in conversation. It was around this time that Meghan shared with the world that there were discussions within the royal family about how dark her baby son Archie’s complexion might be—and how this could deny him a future royal title.
Oprah’s shocked reaction was one perfect for future memes.
Meghan would later go on to describe the “racism” of the tabloids that harassed her nonstop—but she made a point to mince her words when it came to calling the royal family racist. (It would not be until never-before-seen footage from the interview later shared by Oprah during Monday’s CBS This Morning that the couple would open up more about how “rude and racist is not the same.”)
This pales in comparison to the expectations the press once stoked about the couple’s marriage, and the hope it would bring change to the British monarchy. “Just by saying, ‘I do,’ Markle will break the mold of colonization and white supremacy that has defined the British aristocracy,” Elizabeth Wellington in the Philadelphia Inquirer had written in 2017 about the wedding.
“Can Meghan Markle Save the Monarchy?” a New York Times article by Irenosen Okojie asked.
Clearly, none of that was the case, and it was cringeworthy to hear Prince Harry once again talk about how he was not aware of “unconscious bias” around racism until being married to Markle. “Unconscious bias, from my understanding, having the upbringing and the education that I had, I had no idea what it was. I had no idea it existed,” Harry said during an October 2020 interview for GQ. “And then, sad as it is to say, it took me many, many years to realize it, especially then living a day or a week in my wife’s shoes.”
What remained the elephant in the interview was how Harry donned a Nazi costume, with a swastika on the sleeve, during his brother Prince William’s infamous “Colonials and Natives” party back in 2005. Harry has since expressed regret in the press for participating, but lacking such acknowledgement for the royal family’s racist history made his discussion of “the race element” in the interview infuriating.
So are we to believe Prince Harry had no clue that his family would react to Markle this way when they were still celebrating their colonialism and genocide of marginalized people in the 21st century?
Sure, Harry. Sure.
The strength of the interview was Oprah, who never backed down from getting to the bottom of certain details pertaining to the racial backlash the couple faced. When she circled back to try to get Harry to tell her who was behind questioning his son’s possibly darker complexion, it made it clear that the headlines to come were going to put race at the forefront—something I’m not sure that the royal couple were anticipating as much.
Sure, their exit was noteworthy, and the toxic tabloid fodder was intriguing, but all of this was because a British prince chose to marry a Black American woman of mixed race ancestry—and to ignore such details would be to misunderstand how any of this happened.
While conservative talking heads at Fox News and U.K. pundits like Piers Morgan try to deny the role of race in this matter, we know better. Although previous wives of royalty have faced scrutiny, the first Black duchess of the British monarchy faced something remarkably different, such that it forced her and Harry out of the kingdom for good. We can’t keep ignoring how all of this happened during an era of intense social media, Blexit, and racial uprisings.
For me, the royal family should give a formal apology on their negligence in failing to ensure protection for Harry and Meghan’s family. Furthermore, I think whoever posed the racist question as to Archie’s skin color should step forward and apologize for their actions as well.
If that happens, I think the family should find a more amicable way for them to influence the palace’s protocol to address racism and unconscious bias in the future. In other words, the British monarchy needs racial sensitivity training and a total makeover to rid itself of its current racial undertones/reputation.
Regardless of the couple treading lightly, the reverberations from their bombshell interview have put the royal family is a position to be held accountable. Never in recent history has the royal family faced such pressure to respond to serious allegations of racism. Harry and Meghan might have known that playing it safe with their rhetoric was all they had to do to spark the fire that has now rightfully launched a PR crisis for the royals.
They might not think it’s revenge, but it’s definitely karma for an elite group that’s gotten away with far too much to recall.
