THE ROYAL FAMILY’S DIRTY LAUNDRY MOMENT: MEGHAN, HARRY, OPRAH, AND RACE

 

Ordinarily, we wouldn’t post about an Oprah Winfrey interview with British royals.  We concern

ourselves, though, with issues that reflect what’s happening in society and that people care about. Seventeen million viewers watched the recent CBS interview, American television’s second largest non-sporting event audience this year. Eleven million people in the United Kingdom saw the interview.  So, Winfrey’s interview

with Prince Harry and his wife, Meghan Markle, caught our attention. The interview left the royal family with tough questions that deserve answers. Buckingham Palace put out a statement a few days later saying the royal family would address the issues the interview raised “privately.”  The interview left many disappointed and feeling the western world lost another opportunity for putting racial animus behind us.

Markle, the mixed race American actress who married Harry in a storybook wedding in May 2018, told Winfrey life as an active royal made her

contemplate suicide. She said she reached out for help with her mental distress but was told she shouldn’t expect assistance. She said royal family members didn’t want her then unborn son holding a title or having the security arrangements royals typically receive. Unidentified family members expressed “concerns” about how dark his skin might be. Markle and her husband wouldn’t say who raised the “concerns,” though

Harry denied it was either of his grandparents, Queen Elizabeth II or her husband, the ailing Prince Philip. Rampant speculation about who it was consumed the British and American media.

The UK and the One Drop Rule

From the time Harry and Meghan began dating in

2016, British tabloids were fascinated (repulsed?) by the idea of an English royal involved in a romance with a person of color. Some weren’t nice about it. Meghan almost certainly carries more white than black ancestry. Her father, Thomas

Markle, is a white man. The world views her mother, Doria Ragland, as black, though her skin tone and other features suggest some European ancestry. Meghan, therefore, in the eyes of many, is black because of the “one drop rule.”

In order to prevent the offspring of enslaved women and white masters from claiming inheritance rights through their biological fathers, 

many American states enforced two provisions in probate and family law.  First, children carried the racial status of their mothers. Second, the presence of any black ancestry made a person legally black – the one drop rule.

England never had such laws, but the custom apparently followed Meghan into her relationship with Harry. Seemingly that view held sway with some members of the royal family who weren’t hesitant about expressing themselves.

Meghan’s distress has now caused all kinds ofproblems. The British Commonwealth includes nations with lots of people of color. Many embraced Meghan. For them, the royal family’s behavior has been a supreme disappointment and bolstered the push in some countries for ending ties with the monarchy.

 

Is This Really Happening?

“Concern” about the skin color of a royal family member’s child in the 21^st century indicates the world hasn’t changed as much as we might have hoped. It may mean Britain has racial problems not much different from those in the United States. The controversy suggests Meghan and Harry’s marriage now represents a lost opportunity.

Interracial marriage isn’t unusual anymore. The statistics tell a clear enough story. Rates of intermarriage among blacks in the

United States doubled between 1980 and 2010 and keep rising. Beyond the numbers, just watch television or shop in a bookstore. Interracial couples and their children appear in commercials for banks, food products, cars, skin disease treatments, furniture, even erectile dysfunction medications. Novels about interracial romances flood bookstore shelves.

Perhaps the idea of a British royal in an interracial marriage was too much, despite changing attitudes. As a friend of one of us says about the royal family and its notions of what’s acceptable and what’s not, the royals follow a rule that says, “That’s different!”

 

A Missed Opportunity

When Meghan and Harry wed, we took note of the

inclusivity and cultural diversity their marriage ceremony put on display. We titled our post, “Not Your Grandfather’s Royal Wedding.”  A black American cleric, Bishop Michael Curry, offered the homily. A mostly black singing group, the

                                       

Kingdom Choir, and a black cellist, Sheku Kanneh-

Mason, provided the featured music. We thought the inclusivity of the wedding portended a more tolerant era, one that could help England and the everyone else put racial animus further in the rear-view mirror.

The mistreatment Meghan received, behavior that led her and Harry to flee the United Kingdom for

California and life outside the royal  bubble, suggests the bright promise of a new world we saw was an illusion. Things haven’t changed as we thought. The British have their own version of the racial insensitivity and backward thinking we see so much of in the United States.

Perhaps there’s no reason for surprise. We wondered how that 2018 ceremony struck some members of the royal family. One of us got a text from a relative wondering if the wedding “stretched British stiff upper lips to their snapping point.”  Now it appears those fears may have been realized. Perhaps the way the wedding --- and the marriage itself – struck some royals was a version of the idea another of our friends expresses when he sees white people unhappy about some indicator of racial progress. He exclaims, “We can’t have that!”

LOVE IN BLACK AND WHITE: INTERRACIAL ROMANCE 2018

White Men/Black Women; Black Men/White Women -- What’s the World Coming To? 

Does anybody still care if blacks and whites become lovers or spouses?  Fifty-one years after the Supreme Court voided laws against interracial marriage, are interracial romances even a curiosity?  We explore the questions through three sets of eyes.

Rob Writes

“His color means little,” she said. “It’s how considerate he is, his thoughtfulness, the way he makes love to me, that matters.” A white woman friend gave me that response recently when I asked her about her relationship with a black man. She and her partner aren’t married, but they’ve lived together five years and behave toward each other and the world as a married couple.  

One in six new marriages in America involve people from different races. Between 1980 and 2017, the percentage of blacks marrying someone from a different race rose from five to 18 percent. Opposition among whites to a family member marrying someone black dropped from 31 percent in 2000 to ten percent today. Television commercials for car insurance, food, banks, and other products and services now feature black/white couples.

My friend and her partner, therefore, reflect a trend, but their union doesn’t win uniform acceptance. “Two couples stared at us recently,” she told me, “like we were exotic creatures at the zoo. One couple was white, the other black, past middle age. Maybe that’s the dividing line. I can’t say we’ve gotten that response from younger people.”  Pew research, for example, shows people over 50 are twice as likely to see interracial marriage as a “bad thing” as people under 30.  

Scholarly research and polling reveal much about interracial coupling in America:

•  People living in cities intermarry more than those residing in rural areas. 

•  Republicans are twice as likely as Democrats to see interracial marriage as a “bad thing.”
•  Qualitative studies show many white Americans still regard dating and marrying someone black as “strange” or “weird.”

•  In one 2017 survey, 20 percent of black respondents said mixed marriages are “bad for society.” 

• Twice as many black men marry white women as black women marry white men. 

• Divorce rates for interracial marriages are about ten percent higher than for same race couples, but up to 44% lower for black woman/white man couples.

One virtually unexplored frontier remains: POLITICS.  The nation has minimal experience with interracial relationships among the political elite. Only a few high ranking elected officials are involved in mixed marriages – New York Mayor Bill DeBlasio and his black wife, Chirlane McCray, and Utah Congresswoman Mia Love and her white husband, Jason Love, come to mind. Michigan Republican senatorial nominee John James’s wife, Elizabeth, is white. 

                           

 

This may change. California Senator Kamala Harris, a black woman whose husband, Douglas Emhoff, is white, looks like she’s running for President.  If she runs and makes head way, presumably some people will take note of her interracial marriage. Senator Harris, therefore, could challenge the conclusion Janet Langhart, a black woman, reached when she became involved with then Maine Senator William Cohen. Langhart told Cohen she wouldn’t marry him while he remained in elective office because she feared voters would punish him. Langhart and Cohen married, but only after Cohen announced his departure from the Senate. He served as Defense Secretary during Bill Clinton’s second term.

I find the research and the attitudes reported interesting, but relationships are really about love and dedication to another person.  As someone involved in an interracial relationship, I’d like to know what difference it makes to anyone with whom I share my affections. But, then, I don’t understand many things about the world. 

Woodson Chimes In

“Miss Walker! Miss Walker! Miss Walker!  There’s a white woman outside!” my first grade classmate (and cousin)

shouted upon seeing a white woman approach our school in Holly Springs, Arkansas in 1956.  Though the teacher, my mother, responded, “She’s just a woman,” Jerry, like me, believed whites were different from “coloreds” (the way of referring to African-Americans then) and they shouldn’t mix. That’s just the way it was.

By my 1967 enrollment at historically black Arkansas AM&N College, things had changed. We “coloreds” started calling ourselves “black” and demanded treatment equal to whites. That included the right to marry interracially.  Along with my more militant brothers and sisters, I felt we’d been oppressed by whites and, therefore, couldn’t marry one.  My radicalization committed me to “Black Nationalism,” Pan Africanism” and other racial group formulations evidencing solidarity with people of color worldwide.  I viewed marrying a white person as betraying the movement. 

                                            

                           

My later reintroduction to the Christian religion of my birth caused me to reexamine that principle. Christianity told me “there is neither Jew nor Greek, black nor white; old thing

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s are passed away; all things are made new.” Martin Luther King, Jr. admonished me to judge men and women by the content of their character, not the color of their skin. Other religions – Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, the great religions of Africa -- each taught the oneness of all humanity.  My five years of law school and law practice in multi-ethnic Minnesota helped convince me I should cling less to tribal beliefs and recognize that of the 2.7 billion inhabitants of this planet, the choice of who one loves is nobody’s business but their own.

Henry Says

If romantic relationships uniquely define our lives, logic

suggests our quest for them is personal and third parties should have little say in individual choices. Prejudice, political considerations, social balancing, and ignorance may interfere with one’s romantic choices, but that just reveals how far humans must travel in route to existence on a higher plane where respect and understanding abound.  Until we get there, we live lives filled with small and petty concerns.