For Black Britons, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry's interview is a scathing assessment of the Crown, UK's entrenched racism

Hours after an interview with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan, was broadcast in the United States on Sunday, Britain was already grappling with the shock wave rippling out across the Atlantic, exposing a deep royal rift. In the two-hour prime-time interview with Oprah Winfrey — to be shown in Britain on Monday night — Meghan and Harry spoke frankly about what drove them away from Britain last year, taking a sharp turn from the default silence of the royal family. They spoke of comments by one family member about the potential colour of their son’s skin, racist coverage from the tabloid press and a general lack of support that Meghan said drove her to thoughts of suicide.

For many Black Britons, the interview offered a scathing assessment of the royal family and resurfaced barely submerged tensions over entrenched racism in the country at large.

“It’s very hard listening to the interview not to focus on some of the salacious details and the family drama,” said Marcus Ryder, a visiting professor of media diversity at Birmingham City University. “But what we’re talking about is a major part of the British state; it’s a major institution.” The allegations of racism made during the interview could have major implications for the monarchy, he said, whose family members and their households are paid in part with public funds. “Once you realise that, and divorce it from the idea of the personal family drama, what you have is a Black woman who was the first, in the modern era anyway, to enter that British institution,” Ryder said, “and makes allegations of racism at the very top.” [caption id=“attachment_9390471” align=“alignnone” width=“640”]  Prince Harry, Meghan Markle with Oprah Winfrey. Twitter @Oprah[/caption] Meghan’s revelation that someone in the royal household questioned whether her son would be “too dark to represent the UK” was a major problem, he said. (On Monday, Winfrey said that Harry had asked her to clarify that neither Queen Elizabeth II nor Prince Philip was the source of that comment.)

Many critics noted the marked imbalance between the bombshell disclosures in the interview and the palace’s clumsy attempts to discredit Meghan as a bully in a leak to The Times of London last week.

For others, the interview was a moment to reflect on the decidedly different public persona of Harry and Meghan as they broke with the dutiful silence expected of the royal family and brought a more American approach. Meghan had previously spoken about her struggle to adopt the British stiff-upper-lip sensibility, and during Sunday’s interview the couple signaled an apparent desire to seize control of their own narrative, positioning themselves as global philanthropists. The Daily Mail, a British tabloid that Meghan won a privacy case against last month, on Monday morning led with the all-caps headline “I wanted to kill myself.” While it trumpeted Meghan’s comments about her mental health, it called the discussions about race “a sensational claim.” The interview left the country divided, with major news outlets publishing biting commentary. On social media, some denounced the couple’s infidelity to the family, while others firmly defended them. The reaction illustrated divisions between those who view Harry and Meghan as victims and those who disapprove of their behavior and of their willingness to attack the monarchy in public. Critics argued that by refusing to name the person who questioned the skin color of their son, they had made it impossible for the royal family to try to rebut the allegation. In the Daily Telegraph, Camilla Tominey wrote that the conclusion the couple seemed to want the public to draw was that since “we are never likely to know, we may as well consider them all white supremacists, along with any journalist who has ever written anything vaguely negative about them.” In the beginning, when her engagement to Harry was announced, Meghan was acclaimed as an international beacon of a more inclusive royal family — until then a profoundly white institution. But that moment quickly passed, and she soon found herself under frequent attack in the British tabloids, often the subject of articles laced with overtly racist language or undertones of bigotry. Yet what cut particularly deeply, Meghan said, was the lack of support from other family members. And when she went in search of help for her increasingly desperate mental state, the palace’s human resources department said its hands were tied because she was not a staff member. She was further told, she said, that she could not go to a psychiatric facility because that would reflect poorly on the family. Many noted that the allegations made by Meghan during the interview highlighted a blind spot in much of the British news media when it comes to race, with the ranks of royal correspondents nearly all white. “This is a story which is predicated on race,” Ryder said. “And what we have is that we have a British media that has so far been slow to recognise that this is actually a racial story.”

Ryder also said the allegations could have broad repercussions for the monarchy, highlighting long-standing questions about inclusion and the hereditary model of succession.

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“We keep talking about issues of diversity, and how well does diversity sit with the hereditary principle?” he asked, noting that some may argue that there is a way to make it work. “But what she’s saying is that there seems to be a conflict.” Megan Specia c.2021 The New York Times Company. Stephen Castle contributed reporting