We should all be rejoicing over Meghan’s celebration of her roots

IN CHOOSING African-american music as a kind of theme for her wedding to Prince Harry, Meghan Markle gave the world her calling card. Her insistence on being seen as bi-racial gave way to the roots of that claim. She wants us all to know that the font of her being springs from those maternal ancestors, shipped to America as merchandise.

After all, she was brought up by her mother, Doria Ragland, an Africanamerican woman who once had the “N word” hurled at her in a parking lot soon after the Los Angeles riots.

This massive civil disturbance, sparked by the brutal attack on an unarmed and non-resisting Africanamerican man in 1992, rocked the nation. It was a throwback to those bad old days when the colour of your skin was somehow illegal.

That April and May of 1992, Meghan, then 10 years old, witnessed the racial abuse of her mother. She was just a little girl in her Mamma’s car, but she has said that she has never forgotten this. Neither have we, the Black British community and Africanamericans, victims and witnesses and bearers of our ancestors’ legacy. To everyone and for everyone, Meghan’s chosen theme for her big day centres on the fact that she wants her new country to never forget where she comes from. And of which she came.

We know, too, that she will have, as we African-americans say, “a hard row to hoe” as she plants the seeds of her work within a nation going through epic change. She could be one of the leaders of this change, one

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of its beacons.

It is important to remember that there are two other creators of this cultural moment: the Queen and the Prince of Wales. We would be overly romantic and downright naive to think that any of this happened without their permission and consent. That the Queen bestowed the title Duke of Sussex on her grandson adds another coda.

The last Duke of Sussex was what might be described today as liberal. He supported the reform of Parliament; Catholic emancipation; the removal of existing civil restrictions on Jewish people and dissenters; and, most meaningful to the Black British community and African Americans, the abolition of the slave trade.

This glorious symmetry of making the new wife of her grandson the first Duchess of Sussex could not have escaped Her Majesty. Nor we who are descended from slaves. Neither did the use of Stand By Me, a soul song sung as gospel; nor the participation of an African-american minister; nor the addition of 19-yearold cellist Sheku Kanneh-mason, born in Nottingham; nor the homily spoken by Jamaican-born Rev Rose Josephine Hudson-wilkin, chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons, priest-vicar at Westminster Abbey.

The wedding was moving, too, because the Duchess of Sussex’s new husband’s father and grandmother allowed it. This allowance does not create “change”, as an over-excited American anchor gushed on US TV. It acknowledges change. Because Meghan and Harry are what Britain looks like today.

African-americans and the Black British community have always known this. We smile because this knowledge is officially out and accepted. What it will actually come to is another matter. But for now, there is rejoicing.