More than an ‘other’ I told Meghan what it means to be mixed race in Britain
Entrepreneur Jessica Huie tells Peter Stanford why she feels positive about being biracial in Britain today
What is it like being a young woman of colour walking in through the front door of the British establishment? Meghan Markle will find out on May 19 when she marries Prince Harry in St George’s Chapel, Windsor, but she is unlikely to be sharing her impressions publicly.
Jessica Huie, however, can shed some light – for two reasons. First, this successful businesswoman got to know Markle in 2015 when, through her PR agency, she accompanied the then Suits actress on a trip to Malta to walk in the footsteps of Markle’s Maltese great-great-grandmother. And secondly because 38-year-old Huie knows what it is like to be invited (by hand-written letter) by a prime minister to walk through the front door of 10 Downing Street. Gordon Brown invited her there to join a discussion group with other entrepreneurs. The youngest “expert” there, at 27, one of only two women among the 10 invitees and the only person of colour at the table, she took her seat between Peter Jones of Dragons’ Den and the boss of Glaxosmithkline.
But that was only after she had had to hide in the Downing Street loo because she had suffered what she calls “massive impostor syndrome”. “I just thought, ‘I don’t belong here. What do I have to contribute?’”
We are sitting in a boutique hotel overlooking the Thames near Richmond, south-west London, where she lives with her husband, Kwame, and her two daughters. Huie is all elegance, poise and ease. I can’t imagine her feeling out of place anywhere. She laughs: “You become more confident as you get older, but it was often background that got me – things like where people spent their weekends, when they talked about going skiing, or what private school they had been at. That was when I would feel most lonely.”
We are here to talk about her new self-help book, Purpose. She resists the label “role model”, but regularly gives motivational talks through various charities, including Rocking Ur Teens and Save The Children. Huie grew up on a west London council estate, the oldest child of a Jamaican father and English mother. Her dad, part of the Windrush generation, came over in 1952. “He arrived with such pride. He was a bus driver, despite being a qualified teacher in Jamaica – his qualifications were never recognised here. When I look now at the picture of him in his uniform, I’m almost glad he is no longer alive to witness what has happened to others of his generation. It hurts. The acknowledgement and apology by Theresa May is a first step, but let’s be clear, it’s just a first step.”
It was, she says, a loving home, but also one made “dysfunctional” by struggles with addiction. She was expelled from school at 15 and two years later had a daughter, Monet. She started raising her as a single mother in a tower block: “I realise now it was me trying to take control of my life, but I didn’t have any of the resources to enable that.”
Her message today is simple but challenging: “We are more,” she insists, “than our racial or ethnic backgrounds. I was brought up in a home where the word “character” was used a lot. It was all about what sort of person you were going to be. And from what I know of Meghan, she is a great woman who has already used her life to be of service, and to make a contribution.”
Their relationship began with them talking by Skype and hitting it off. “Meghan was over in London and we had been involved in a charity event for children caught up in wars.”
Then came the trip to Malta, which was Huie’s suggestion, and all about Markle connecting with her heritage, as her great-great grandmother, Mary, was born there in 1862.
“On that trip, we had those conversations you have when two people are working closely together. Inevitably, we talked a lot about what it is like to be of mixed heritage.”
Shortly afterwards, Prince Harry’s future bride wrote a piece for Elle magazine under the title, “I am more than an ‘other’”. It was about constantly being asked to define her ethnicity, and touched on the discussions the two of them had had. “To describe something as being black and white means it is clearly defined,” Markle wrote. “Yet when your ethnicity is black and white, the dichotomy is not that clear. In fact, it creates a grey area. Being biracial paints a blurred line that is equal parts staggering and illuminating…
[By] sharing small vignettes of my experiences as a biracial woman, today I am choosing to be braver, to go a bit deeper, and to share a much larger picture of that with you.”
Huie can relate to a lot of what she said. She remembers the head at her school asking her mother: “How does Jessica cope with being mixed race?” And her mother took issue with the word “cope”.
“When I was growing up,” she says, “the only person I saw on TV who looked like me, and had curly hair like me, was Diana Ross.” That same absence of recognisable faces was still there when she was raising her own daughter. This time, though, she could do something about it and would soon set up her own business to tackle one aspect of the problem. By then she had transformed her own life by going back to college and then on to university to study journalism, which was followed by a stint as a writer on Pride magazine and a move into PR, representing A-listers such as Mariah Carey, Samuel L Jackson and Simon Cowell.
One lunchtime in 2006, she found herself on London’s Oxford Street looking for a birthday card for her daughter, who was about to turn seven. “Then, all she wanted was straight, blonde hair. I was looking for a card with a picture of a brownskinned princess, so I could write in it: ‘You are perfect as you are’.” She couldn’t find one anywhere. And so Color Blind Cards – a multi-racial greetings card and gift company – was born. Initially, it was a stand at the Notting Hill Carnival, but quickly grew into a company supplying high-street stores, and exporting its greetings cards all around the world.
Markle also made this point in her Elle article when she wrote about growing up wanting a Barbie doll set of the ideal family, but they were always either all white or all black. Her father bought two, one white, one black, and mixed them up to give his daughter something that looked like her family.
Does Huie think Markle will continue speaking out on such issues as a royal? “Well, her presence can’t help but spark the conversation,” she replies. “It already has. And some of it will be expansive, and some will be the opposite.”
Early in his relationship with Meghan Markle, Prince Harry publicly rebuked the press for the “racial undertones” in their coverage of the romance. And there have been some awkward remarks since. Commentator Rachel Johnson once described the “rich and exotic” DNA that Markle could bring to the Windsor gene pool, and when on Celebrity Big Brother, Ann Widdecombe, the former Conservative minister, said: “I think she’s trouble […] background, attitude. I worry.”
Huie, however, isn’t discouraged. She is, she stresses, above all an optimist. “We are in a time of change.” Change for the better? “Yes.” And that same robust positivity is also the keynote to her book. There was nothing “strategic” about her decision to write it, she explains. Indeed, if there was a decision, it wasn’t her who took it.
It was 2016, and her father was dying. She was caring for him in his last days when she woke up one morning at three o’clock feeling a compulsion to write. “I just put my heart on to the page. I felt as if the book flowed from beyond me.
“I don’t want to hide any more. The need to fit, and to belong, the need for validation, have driven a lot of my achievement, but I am ready to leave that behind.”
Purpose: Find Your Truth and Embrace
Your Calling by Jessica Huie is published by Hay House (£12.99). To order for £10.99 plus p&p, call 0844 871 1514 or visit books.telegraph.co.uk