The Black & White Of It

- Joanne Black

African-American actor Whoopi Goldberg was indeed whooping on the day the engagement was announced between Prince Harry and the United States actor Meghan Markle.

“Markle would be the very first biracial American royal in the UK,” Goldberg told ABC’s daytime talk show The View. “The hue of the royal family is about to shift, which is kind of interesting. It’s kind of wonderful. All you kids out there, all you little girls who say, ‘That could never happen to me,’ I’m telling you, stuff’s happening all the time.”

It seems more than a little regressive that little girls are still being encouraged to aspire to marry well, but many people share Goldberg’s instinct that Markle’s ethnicity matters. It is almost certain, says Jennifer DeVere Brody, director of the Centre for Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity at Stanford University in California, that if Markle were white, she and Harry would not have been named in Time magazine’s 100 most influential people of 2018.

“There is a long history of British men ‘rescuing’ brown women and I think their relationship feeds in to an idea of Harry as open, exceptional and modern,” DeVere Brody says.

Writing in Time, actor Priyanka Chopra gushed that her friend Markle “found her prince, fell in love and made a cynical world believe in fairy tales again”. However, as Harry’s complaint in the early stages of their courtship about the “wave of abuse and harassment” made clear, the relationship also attracts racist vitriol.

That experience is one way we understand that people are black, says Ralina Joseph, the director of the Centre for Communication, Difference and Equity at the University of Washington in Seattle. “Having to face antiblack racism means that you understand what it means to be African American.”