Several high-profile figures and thousands of social media users have thrown their support behind the United Kingdom’s Duchess of Sussex following her headline-grabbing interview with US media personality Oprah Winfrey.
Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan gave Oprah Winfrey an explosive interview that had many people denouncing the “cruelty” she was allegedly subjected to by the British royal family and some sectors of UK media.
The highly anticipated interview, broadcast on Sunday in the US, was the first by Meghan Markle and her husband Prince Harry since they stepped down from royal duties a year ago.
The two-hour special included explosive revelations likely to reverberate on both sides of the Atlantic, with the pair describing controversial discussions in the palace about the colour of their son Archie’s skin, losing royal protection and the intense pressures that led the duchess of Sussex to contemplate suicide.
The Duchess of Sussex revealed the royal family fostered an atmosphere of racial hostility so intense that she came close to suicide while pregnant with her first child.
In a series of stunning revelations during a two-hour, hotly anticipated interview with Oprah Winfrey, Meghan claimed that members of the royal family had openly expressed concerns about how dark her son Archie’s skin would be, that they had gone to extraordinary lengths to deny him the royal title that would ordinarily be his right as a grandson of the monarch, and that they had refused to provide him with security.
When the tabloid newspapers had started race-baiting Meghan openly, nobody from the royal household had lifted a finger to defend her or reconsider the decision about Archie’s security, she claimed.
Meghan said she had felt utterly unprotected from the tabloid onslaught and undermined by what she called the “firm” – the apparatus surrounding the royal household – that had repeatedly turned down her appeals for help and discouraged her from leaving the house for months
The Duchess of Sussex says she had suicidal thoughts during her time as a working royal. “I just didn’t want to be alive any more. And that was a very clear and real and frightening constant thought. And I remember how he [Harry] just cradled me.”
She claimed she asked the palace for help and was denied it. “They said, ‘My heart goes out to you because I see how bad it is, but there’s nothing we can do to protect you because you’re not a paid employee of the institution’.”
The duchess claimed that while she was pregnant with Archie concerns were raised with Prince Harry about the skin colour of their baby. “In those months when I was pregnant, all around this same time, so we have in tandem the conversation of, ‘You won’t be given security, not gonna be given a title’ and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born.”
Meghan declined to name who expressed those concerns: “I think that would be very damaging to them.”
Harry refused to share the details of the conversation but, after prompting from Winfrey, said the questions were along the lines of: “What will the kids look like?”
Wrong Coverage
Meghan denied a newspaper story that she had made the Duchess of Cambridge cry before Meghan and Harry’s wedding and said it was a turning point in her relations with the media. Asked if she made Kate cry, Meghan replied: “The reverse happened.”
Meghan said Kate was a “good person” but added: “A few days before the wedding she [Kate] was upset about something, pertaining to – yes the issue was correct – about the flower girl dresses, and it made me cry. And it really hurt my feelings.” She said Kate apologised at the time and brought her flowers.
Silent or ‘Silenced’?
“Everyone in my world was given a very clear directive from the moment the world knew Harry and I were dating, to always say no comment.”
Meghan said she believed she was being protected by the royal institution.
“It was only once we were married and everything started to really worsen that I came to understand that not only was I not being protected but … they weren’t willing to tell the truth to protect me and my husband.”
She agreed with Oprah that she had been “silenced” rather than “silent” from the moment she started dating Harry.
Asked if she was not supported by the powers that be, she said: “There’s the family, and then there’s the people that are running the institution, those are two separate things and it’s important to be able to compartmentalise that because the Queen, for example, has always been wonderful to me.”
Cut Off
Prince Harry said his father Prince Charles stopped taking his calls about the plan to step aside from royal duties. He denied blindsiding the Queen, saying he had too much respect for her. “I had three conversations with my grandmother, and two conversations with my father before he stopped taking my calls. And then he said, ‘Can you put this all in writing?’”
Asked why Charles had stopped taking his calls, Harry said: “By that point I took matters into my own hands. It was like; I needed to do this for my family. This is not a surprise to anybody. It’s really sad that it’s got to this point, but I’ve got to do something for my own mental health, my wife’s and for Archie’s as well.”
Prince Charles is now taking his calls but “there’s a lot of hurt that’s happened” and the pair have “lots to work through”, he said. “I feel really let down,” Harry said. “He’s been through something similar, he knows what pain feels like.”
He said he stopped receiving palace money in the first quarter of 2020. He said that needing to pay for his own security costs was part of the motivation behind the couple’s lucrative deals with companies including Netflix.
The only other money he has left, he said, is what was left to him by Princess Diana.
Aftermath:
The explosive interview quickly drew mass attention on social media, especially Twitter, where several prominent public figures backed Meghan, a biracial actress whose mother is Black and father is white, for speaking out over the alleged discrimination she faced after marrying into the royal family in 2018.
Meghan’s close friend Serena Williams (US tennis star) said she understood the “pain and cruelty” Meghan had experienced.
Williams, who has won 23 Grand Slam titles, said Meghan had taught her “what it means to be truly noble”.
“I know firsthand the sexism and racism institutions and the media use to vilify women and people of colour to minimise us, to break us down and demonize us,” Williams tweeted.
“The mental health consequences of systemic oppression and victimisation are devastating, isolating, and all too often lethal.”
“I want Meghan’s daughter, my daughter and your daughter to live in a society that is driven by respect.
“Keep in your memory the fruitage of the spirit is love, joy, peace, long-suffering, kindness, goodness, faith, mildness, self-control. Against such things there is no law.”
US television host Nina Parker tweeted: “You know why Black women believe Meghan? Because we know exactly what micro aggressions look like. And how they slowly drive you insane.”
Others said Meghan and Harry’s withdrawal from royal duties symbolised the “cost of racism” for the country.
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“Losing them … was a missed chance to deal [with] the legacies of slavery & colonialism and have a charismatic modern royal to boot,” US author Heather McGhee tweeted.
US poet Amanda Gorman, who came to fame for her performance at President’s Joe Biden’s inauguration, tweeted: “This isn’t Meghan’s princess ‘happy’ ending. But sometimes change, the decisions that bring us the most hurt, aren’t about happiness, but healing.
“Unclear if this will change the Royal family, but Meghan’s strength will certainly redefine family everywhere,” she added. “Think of the women who will be inspired to stand up for their lives, the partners who will be kinder & more courageous than the kin they were born into.”
Bernice King, Martin Luther King, Jnr’s daughter, said Meghan’s experience showed “royalty is not a shield from the devastation and despair of racism”, adding such discrimination was a “traumatizing threat to the mental, physical, and economic well-being of millions and millions of people”.
“It’s not a difference of opinion. It’s not an illusion of the ‘woke.’ It is a pervasive evil. Let’s decolonize our minds,” she tweeted.
Booker-nominated author Maaza Mengiste said Meghan’s expressions showed “trauma”.
During the interview, Meghan said she had not realised what she was marrying into when she joined the British monarchy and “went into it naively”.
The couple’s critics argue they wanted the limelight of royal life but were not willing to live with the attention it brought.
But to supporters, their alleged treatment is evidence of an outdated British institution.
