We’ve all watched Oprah’s interview with Meghan Markle. We can all agree that Meghan Markle went through some seriously messed up crap with the Royal Family.
Is it horrible? Yes. Is it surprising? Absolutely not.
When the news first came out in 2017 that Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were engaged, I remember feeling scared for Meghan. It’s absolutely horrible that we still live in a time where you have to fear when a mixed-race person marries into the Royal Family, but I was rational enough to realize that it might not end well.
Part of me, admittedly, was moved. Meghan Markle embodied everything the Royal Family lacks: she’s half-Black, an ardent feminist, and led a successful acting career of her own. Maybe the Royal Family is *finally* ready to embrace change and live life in the 21st Century. But then again, the British Empire has a centuries-long history of colonialism and exploitation, so you never do know.
We’ve all asked the same question: how could Meghan not have known what she was getting into?
Something that continually puzzled me was the clash between Meghan’s feminism and the environments that she finds herself in; in both her acting choices and in her choice of marriage, she constantly finds herself in environments that are notoriously stuck in the past. I used to find her to be so hypocritical, like an unfeminist feminist.
Until, I realized that perhaps, her plight says less about her and more about the institutions we choose to uphold. It’s obvious from Meghan’s experiences that our world has never treated women, particularly women of color, with equal respect.
A Brief History
Let’s start with Meghan’s career-defining TV show: Suits.
I’ll go ahead and admit that I’ve watched seven seasons of Suits. It was a guilty pleasure seeing pretentious lawyers indulge in their own egos and get into petty catfights. It’s entertaining. But a feminist show, it is not. It got to the point where Meghan Markle fought against the show’s portrayal of her character in her later seasons.
My brother is also a fan of Suits, and I recently talked with him about how un-feminist the show is. He responded with, “Why? All the women in that show are super cool and successful.”
Yes, the women in Suits are very capable women. Let’s take, for example, Meghan Markle’s character, Rachel. Though Rachel’s father is a name partner at his own law firm, Rachel chooses not to go down that perfectly paved path of working for her father, instead opting to work as a paralegal for Pearson Specter, her father’s rival firm.
My problem with Suits lies not in how cool the women are, but in how they are subordinate to their male counterparts. To me, the show perpetuates (and thrives off of) the image of the “Alpha Male,” in that it’s always the men that close the deals, the men with the mic-drop lines, the men that ultimately get the job done. I remember always feeling something amiss about Suits until I realized that it’s because, well, all the lawyers are men, and all the women are either their secretaries or paralegals. That is, except for Jessica, who is the head of the firm, who is also a Black woman. As much as I love Jessica, the tokenism is too obvious.
The tokenism at Kensington Palace is also too obvious.
As I said, I could never understand why Meghan Markle constantly chose to be part of environments that are so unprogressive. But it’s important to realize that she is a half-Black, half-white woman, and our world loves to use these women to show the face of diversity, only to either diminish or destroy them later on.
If you’re anything like me, you too, want an easy blame. It’s too easy to blame Meghan Markle for her troubles, with things like “She chose to marry into the Royal Family, she knew what she was getting into,” or, “She chose to be part of Suits, so she’s not allowed to complain about the show.” Let’s stop blaming a woman for loving who she loves, who was also a struggling actress trying to find any show that would cast her. Let’s instead blame the institution that painted her into a monster just because she married a white prince or the entertainment companies that are still thriving from reusing the same lame themes that are so, so outdated.
Let’s ask ourselves why we still uphold these horrible institutions. And let’s stop being so complacent.