Local View: Markle the royal a boost for humanity.
Last week’s announcement that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are engaged, and the social media reactions to it, were particularly interesting. The fascinating conversations, of course, surrounded her race, or rather her complexion. Make no mistake about it: This conversation took place between those who have melanin and those without.
However, before I get into that, let me first say that this announcement is more than a win for people of color. It’s actually a win for all people. You see, Great Britain for all of its wonderful history and cultural flavors still has unique racial issues. This cannot be ignored when discussing the crown’s first lineage of color. The fact that Prince Harry chose to push through obvious and subversive cultural mores is both commendable and beautiful. He chose to change the look of one of the world’s oldest institutions — the English crown. That alone is a win for people.
The second part of this conversation focuses on Markle’s complexion — and for some, the lack thereof. However one must feel about her color, the world sees her as a black woman. Most important, though, Markle identifies herself as biracial. Her mother is African-American and her father is Caucasian. Rather than evaluate just how “black” she truly is, which is really inconsequential, I think the fact that she acknowledges her racial complexity should be enough for people.
People may ask, how does she operate culturally? For this moment, and in the future, it’s truly unimportant. Whether she acts on the cultural scale akin to biracial celebrities Alicia Keys or Tiger Woods (or even a Mike Tirico, who doesn’t even feel comfortable calling himself biracial or think of himself as black) is beside the point of how the world will interact with her. The one-drop rule still applies.
I did not grow up multiracial, but I have enough friends who were a product of two or three races who have said their biggest challenge was not only whom they identified with culturally, but also how the world interpreted them. So the conversation about removing people out of their racial identity because you don’t think it fits your cultural interpretation is both irrelevant and nonprogressive.
That’s not to say I am not aware that people shed their identities in certain spaces. But how does this really matter when the greater conversation is about being the first? We may not all like how Tiger Woods operated (pre-car crash). But we all appreciated that his very presence forever changed the optics of that sport. To me, that will always be his legacy — nothing more, nothing less.
And so the same goes for the soon-to-be future Princess Markle. How she operates is secondary to how she will forever change the optics of the crown. Cheers to humanity.