What Meghan and The Royal Family Drama Means For Black Community
And you know what else is not cute? Institutional racism.
The Crown tells the story of what a burden carrying that tiara can involve. And turns out Prince Harry and Meghan are also watching The Crown.
I am glad to see that the royal family is finally taking the allegations by Meghan and Harry of racism and exclusionary treatment seriously
We go into details of the events that followed the groundbreaking Oprah interview, aired on CBS. Revelations from that interview were many but one truly important sight stood out.
Meghan Markle can be a princess and the Duchess of Sussex but as a woman of color, she is facing a similar issue to most of us.
Black girls are discriminated for the shade of their skin.
According to a now-famous blog article by the cofounder of OKCupid, the study in 2014 showed Black women are “the least desirable” and less attractive.
In 2014, Christian Rudder of OkCupid published Dataclysm: Who We Are (When We Think No One’s Looking), a book that detailed how our private online behavior belies our public personas.
While the book covers all things analytics from Google searches to Facebook likes, one of the more viral revelations was the data surrounding race-based dating preferences.
Dataclysm also reported that black women receive 25 percent fewer first messages on OkCupid than women of all other ethnicities. In fact, the strongest biases in heterosexual dating preferences were against black women and Asian men.
That resonated so much with Ari Curtis, 28, and inspired her blog, Least Desirable where she writes on her cultural and dating experiences as a black woman.
She goes on to say Black hair is not a hair style but a badge of otherness.
Most of us believe that just because some of us are white passing, somehow we should be treated equally to white women. But even for a case like Meghan, whose blackness is hardly perceivable, it simply does not wash away.
On the recent Netflix hit, Bridgerton, race was also a huge topic of discussion.
Duke of Hastings was featured as a Black man and the British Queen was a black woman.
Many people found it a hard try to represent Britain of 18th century, where one could hardly talk about race equality.
Oprah Mag even went on to ask the question we’ve all been thinking:
“Does historical accuracy matter?”
For the record, for those who are wondering, according to romance novelist and historian Vanessa Riley, there were Black nobility. And yes, even a Black duke in Regency Era in 1813 London. But both the scale and level of acceptance of those people shown in Bridgerton is largely historically inaccurate — but purposefully so.
“I like to represent the world we live in, the audience we’re serving, and people who have always lived,” Page tells me. “It’s not like people of color existing is a modern phenomenon. We’ve always been there, we are here, and we’re gonna be there. I think one of the best ways to do that is to have conversations with people because there are unique concerns that affect how we navigate in society.”
Although Bridgerton and the inclusion of a mixed princess into British Royal Family may fool us, the actual reality for BIPOC is very different.
It makes us ask one question…
If a white-passing mixed princess can experience racism and be so deeply hurt by it, how about the rest of us?
Those who aren’t white-passing nor married into royalty?
It’s more important than ever that we form our communities and stand strong.
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