CONFUSING TRUTH ABOUT GROWING UP MIXED-RACE
...by Meghan in her own words
THE birth of the Duke and Duchess of Sussex’s son isn’t just a momentous occasion for the new parents – it’s a symbolic moment for mixedrace people across the UK.
For the first time, a member of the Royal Family is mixed-race, which means that after decades of white English blood the royals are finally starting to reflect the situation in Britain.
Mixed-race is the fastest-growing ethnic minority group in Britain. The census has only been recording mixed-races since 2001 – it categorises them as white and black Caribbean; white and black African; white and Asian; other mixed – when 1.3 per cent of the population of England and Wales used them. By the time of the 2011 census, this had almost doubled to 2.3 per cent, but experts believe the real figure is double this, meaning there are more than two million mixed-race people in England and Wales.
Dr Reenee Singh, director of the London Intercultural Couples Centre, who has a half-Indian, half-white 13-year- old son, believes that the rise of the mixed-race population shows just how much the UK is changing in terms of shifting social attitudes and greater integration.
She said: ‘There has been progress but it’s more complicated than people realise. Inter-racial families often struggle with discrimination and identity issues – about how difficult it is to express their identities in a mixed family.’
The new royal baby is one-quarter black as Meghan Markle was born to her white American father Thomas Markle and African-American mother Doria. In 2015, two years before she met Prince Harry, Meghan wrote a candid article for American Elle magazine in which described her experiences of growing up mixed-race.
While her dark-skinned mother was subjected to racist abuse, Meghan struggled to find her own identity as a child ‘with a foot on both sides of the fence’, and then later as an aspiring young actress desperate for her first break.
Meghan’s parents met at a TV studio in Los Angeles, where Thomas was working as a lighting director and Doria was a temp in the studio. Meghan said after marrying and having her they settled in a ‘leafy and affordable’ neighbourhood where Doria, ‘caramel in complexion with her light-skinned baby in tow was asked where my mother was, because they assumed she was the nanny.
‘I was too young at the time to know what it was like for my parents, but I can tell you what it was like for me – how they crafted the world around me to make me feel like I wasn’t different, but special.’
SHE described a touching story of how Doria and Thomas, although they divorced when Meghan was six, worked hard to make sure their daughter felt included.
‘When I was about seven I had been fawning over a boxed set of Barbie dolls. It was called the Heart Family and included a mom doll, a dad doll and two children.
‘This perfect nuclear family was sold in sets of white dolls or black dolls.
‘I don’t remember coveting one over the other, I just wanted one. On Christmas morning, there I found my Heart Family – a black mom doll, a white dad doll and a child in each colour. My dad had taken the sets apart and customised the family.’ Meghan went to the Immaculate Heart High
School, a private Roman Catholic school in Los Angeles, where she said her parents could no longer protect her as much as they would like from the challenges her mixed heritage would present.
She recalled a mandatory census the children had to complete in her English class, when she was aged about 12, where they had to tick one of the boxes to indicate ethnicity – white, black, Hispanic or Asian. Meghan had no idea which one to pick.
She wrote: ‘There I was – my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed-race, looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up, but not knowing what to do. You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other – and one half of myself over the other.
‘My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian. “Because that’s how you look, Meghan,” she said. I put down my pen. Not as an act of defiance, but rather a symptom of my confusion. I couldn’t bring myself to do that – to picture the pit-in-her-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out.
‘So I didn’t tick a box. I left my identity blank – a question mark, an absolute incomplete – much like how I felt.
‘When I went home that night I told my dad what had happened. He said the words that have always stayed with me “If that happens again, you draw your own box”.’ Yet she still encountered ‘closed mindedness’ about her parentage when she headed to university in Illinois to study theatre and international studies.
She recalled: ‘A dorm mate I met in my first week asked if my parents were still together. She said “You said your mom is black and your dad is white, right?” I smiled meekly, waiting for what could possibly come out of her pursed lips next. “And they’re divorced?” I nodded. “Oh, well that makes sense.” I understood the implication and I drew back – I was scared to open this Pandora’s box of discrimination so I sat stifled, swallowing my voice.’
ANASTIER encounter with racism occurred one day when the adolescent Meghan returned from university to visit her mother in Los Angeles.
Meghan wrote: ‘ She was called the ‘ N’ word. We were leaving a concert and she wasn’t pulling out of a parking space quickly enough for another driver. I looked to my mom Her eyes welling with hateful tears. We drove home in deafening silence, her chocolate
knuckles pale from gripping the wheel so tightly.’
Meghan said that in her career as an actress she found that she could play a number of races because she was ‘ethnically ambiguous’. But she ultimately discovered ‘I wasn’t black enough for the black roles and I wasn’t white enough for the white ones, leaving me somewhere in the middle as the ethnic chameleon who couldn’t book a job.’
Meghan stressed: ‘While my mixed heritage may have created a grey area surrounding my self-identification, keeping me with a foot on both sides of the fence, I have come to embrace that.
‘To say who I am, to share where I’m from, to voice my pride in being a strong, confident mixed-race woman.’
In the article, Meghan described how she was asked ‘every week of her life, often every day’ what she was and where she came from as people struggled to place her ethnicity. Sometimes she tried to swerve the question, describing herself as a ‘good cook and a firm believer in hand-written notes’. Now, as the mother of a little boy who is seventh in line to the throne, it’s a question she will never have to answer again.