The problem with calling Meghan Markle the "first black princess"
The problem is the history that goes beyond this culture
Meghan Markle is half black. She is biracial. Her father is white and her mother is black. I wrote it down, and then hit "submit." It was my response to almost every text from my friends about Prince Harry's new black fiancĂ©e. With some friends who I know needed this validation of black beauty internationally, I feigned joy: So cool! A white lie — I rarely use the word cool to describe a cultural event other than a modern art show, and those are only reduced to “cool” if they are hardly recognized as art, but are trendy enough to get likes on Instagram. .
The tweets continued on my screen demonstrating the response of the black United States: "A real black princess!" "Secure the palace, sister!", "BlackInBuckingham," "Prepare for a black royal wedding!". I took a bite of my breakfast sandwich, with peanut butter. With my free hand I wrote to a friend: Meghan Markle is the kind of black that most of the whites on the right side of the United States would like us to be, since they have to coexist with blackness.
Markle is like some of the mixed race girls who attended school with me in my suburban neighborhood. When the internet was still a new phenomenon, I used their photos to attract white guys and hear them say they loved me, even if it was only digitally and not really me. Instinctively, they were more adept at romance when it came to dating ambiguously black girls, rather than the obvious ones: dark skin, wide nose, full lips, big eyes, lots of hair. Ambiguous blackness was easily forgotten, or at least easily forgiven, when they introduced you to their families, their white friends, and their black neighbors. With my basketball team, we frequently went to schools like the one in Los Angeles where Markle grew up, which she has described as “a leafy and affordable neighborhood. That it was not, however, diverse ”. The black girls in those basketball games, like the passably white ones at my school, seemed to exist in a world above the blackness that I knew.
They were familiar with white. That was shown in the way they behaved, in how they rested their heads on the shoulders of their white friends without fear of dirtying them with their brown makeup, in how they shouted the names of their friends on the ground without waiting for more than a greeting and in how they constantly pressed their lips as if suspended between the power and the fear that possessed them: to be who you wanted them to be, without the foresight of knowing who you would choose. I have a passable white friend, who is 34 percent black, a percent that we've taken advantage of. For as long as I can remember her, strangers have taken her by the arm when she comes to a place to ask almost immediately what her race is. Her eyes are blue and small freckles dot her face. For a long time I felt that I was the only black friend of hers.
Today, when we speak on the phone, it seems all the same: she apologizes for any white transgression that I can detect. Our lines of communication are always nuanced by her privileged status. She has only dated white men, always tried to be a part of white girl groups in high school, and did things most black women are afraid to do at 17: try lines of cocaine, sleep at her boyfriends' house for a whole weekend. . When I told my older cousin that this friend had been abused by her first boyfriend, she replied: "That happens when girls like her try to be part of white people." She listened to my friend's stories of her being thrown on the floor or pushed against the walls, and my cousin's words were in my mind. There was no compassion for a mixed girl trying to evade her identity and align herself with whiteness.
You can easily guess that my mixed race cousins have a black component. Their hair is thick, their noses are wide, and their lips are enviable full. Markle's experience is the opposite, recalling in an essay for a publication in 2015 that in elementary school, her teacher made her mark the box of Caucasian race, in the censuses, because that indicated her appearance. “He would drop the pen. Not as an act of defiance, but as a symptom of confusion. I couldn't do it, imagining my mother's sadness if she found out. So she didn't mark any boxes, ”Markle wrote. (His father suggested hers later that he write her own classification.) As children, my cousins also had trouble identifying with one race or another.
When they played to pick pairs to go out with white students from their courses, they always asked them to sit at one end looking for others like them who never showed up, in addition to waiting for a call to get back together, which never came. So their mothers encouraged them to go out with their black friends, which made it easier for them. His black friends praised his silkier hair, found them sympathetic even when his jokes were bad, and made room for them at tables even when they were full. At a family gathering, my all-black cousin hung on my shoulder and said "I wish I had her hair like hers." She was referring to my cousin.
Literally, blackness has been seen in history as a stain. Once you touch it, the identity of the person and the value with which it is perceived changes. The US “one drop” rule from the early 1900s not only prohibited interracial cohabitation, but defined anyone with “black blood” in any measure, as black. The British seem to operate in the same way. The press and the public do not seem to distinguish between black and interracial. (A headline in the Daily Mail reads "Harry's girl (almost) comes from Compton"; Markle has called the media fixation on her ethnicity as "daunting").
There is also speculation among experts that the Royal Council will suggest to Markle that she be discreet about her biracial identity, and that she present herself as a white woman. She “She will not be allowed to be a black princess. the only way she would be accepted is to be white, ”Kehinde Andrews, associate professor of sociology at Birmingham City University, told Newsweek. The tendency among the American public has been to enhance her blackness, to incite cautious Britons to force her monarchical fetish to accept her as a black woman, which would signify a degree of acceptance towards us. But there is a different and equally important symbolism in being born into an American interracial family in the late 1970s.
In her essay for a publication, Markle remembers her father's skin "turning from pink to red" when she told him about that teacher who It forced her to identify as white, and her mother's "chocolate knuckles" paled as she clung to the wheel of the car after being called the "N-word" in front of her youngest daughter after the Los Angeles clashes. Markle's impact on the Royal Family is not less because she is not totally black.
Individuals of mixed races have their own stories that are now being revealed in public forums. We have access to numerous media where people of mixed race struggle with their identity. there are complexities not only in how her physical appearance is perceived, but in the emotional burden that this presupposes for her psyche, as well as for those around them.
Their stories are made with feelings of alienation, insecurity, privilege, confusion, envy and (for some also pride of being black or white, but an amalgam of races. Markle is outright beautiful, and they are a fan of her partner with the Prince. Harry (exclusive of my views on the political career behind her engagement), but labeling her as a black girl raised to royalty does a disservice to the evolution of our approach to race and the complexity of blackness.
This essay was written in an apartment building on a street heavily patrolled by the Bronx police. My desk faces a window behind which two young black men no more than 25 years old joke about the girls they slept with on Thanksgiving holiday, while they wait to sell bags of crack, the same bags that I kick away so many mornings. , before the garbage collection service passes. It is the same street in which boys of black and Hispanic origin protested a month ago.
They carried signs calling for the lights in their schools to be kept on for after-school programs. I look at my table where there is a glass of water that I will drink again and again until I am satisfied. I reply to a text message to my aunt, who was the last to refer to the miracle of Harry's black fiancée. I tell her that Markle should be viewed as a mixed race woman from the Valley region. And she replies: "But she is black."
