For the past week, social media has been taken by storm with Prince Harry memes and snippets from Harry and Meghan’s interview with Oprah. This was a rather revealing interview about their not-so-pleasant experience as royalty, more so Meghan Markle’s. Many people are confused as to what all the drama is about and why it matters. It just so happens that this interview puts on display the hard reality women face everyday. The following are the key points from the interview that show it.
Oprah opened the interview mentioning Meghan is deemed a “non-traditional” wife for Prince Harry. She’s older than him, she has been married once before, she’s American, she had a career, and not to mention she is mixed race. “Hurricane Meghan ” said Oprah explaining to Meghan how she was being portrayed in the media. However, Meghan said in the interview she did not read or pay attention to the tabloids. When it came out that she was dating Harry, she was silenced and told not to comment on anything. She was told that she’d be protected if she compiled with that. Yet, the media kept producing negative headlines after negative headlines. Oprah went on to compare headlines about Kate Middelton, Duchess of Cambridge to ones about Meghan. From how many times she would touch her baby bump to eating avocados, Meghan was under fire from the media. Meanwhile Kate was praised for doing the exact same things. Oprah mentioned an incident where Meghan supposedly made Kate cry over flower girl dresses. This turned out to be the complete opposite of what actually happened. A small disagreement between the two women resulted in Meghan crying but Kate apologized. The pattern we’re seeing here is that the royal family was not really protecting Meghan like they had promised, yet other family members were being defended. The question here is, why was she not being defended like other members of the family? What makes her different?
The media however, was doing what they are infamous for; pitting women against each other. Fake feuds and hatred between the two women are plastered everywhere. This isn’t new. We see it with celebrities all the time, for example Nicki Minaj and Cardi B. “If you love me you don’t have to hate her, if you love her you don’t have to hate me” stated Meghan.
When it was announced that her and Harry were expecting, racism reared its ugly head among the family. Meghan was informed by her husband that there was debate over whether or not their child would be given a title and security, and conversations about how dark the child’s skin would be. Why would Meghan and Harry’s child not be given any security or a title, but the other great-grandchildren of the queen have that? What exactly makes their child different from the rest? Meghan told Oprah it was safe to assume that it was because of the child’s mixed race. As a pregnant woman adjusting to a vastly different lifestyle, she began to feel very alone which resulted in her viewing her situation as “unsurvivable”. She brought up her feelings to the institution a.k.a the family and was told she couldn’t seek help because of how it would look.
The intersectionality that comes into play with Meghan’s experience as a royal is important to note. She’s not just a woman, she’s also a woman of a less privileged background(than other women in the family), and she is a woman of color. She was pitted against another woman in the family, her mental health was disregarded, the color of her child’s skin was a concern, and she was under fire by the tabloids all because she was very different from other women within the family. This treatment ultimately led to her and Harry’s departure from the family. Unfortunately Meghan had to live through all this in the public eye, but her experience should make people recognize the fact that no matter where women go, what we achieve, or how high our status is, we are still subject to the same discrimination.