For the last year, Suits actress Meghan Markle has remained at the center of pop culture and media tabloids. Meghan Markle, the daughter of a black women and white man, illustrates the nuanced concept of bi-raciality. I use the word “nuanced” sarcastically as Markle’s contemporary function mirrors her past “mulatto” manifestation, mulatto referencing the diluted black female form sexually objectified by a white man who probably fathered her, yet subjected to the very cruelty of the black body that bore her.  Bi-rciality serves as a means for those who can “pass” as black, or having two black parents, to dismember themselves as split between both both words, using a partial blackness as a means to earn a place in the house of  white supremacy. Markle’s racial ambiguity functions as a means to underscore the beauty of blackness when diluted with whiteness, and emphasize the white savior figure in the “spare” to a British throne.

The black female form, her offspring, and their global function in a racist society have remained intact for centuries, as any evolution of their function would challenge the white supremacist power structure. Meghan Markle, in the symbolism imbued in her bi-raciality and place at the foot of the white man’s bed, or this case monarchy, is veiled a reinforcement of the black female bodily abjection– an abjection Markle’s body symbolizes in conception and lifestyle.  This  pattern of black female bodily abjection seemingly illustrates an evolution of coercion to consent to those unfamiliar with the pervasive subconscious coercion imbued by systemic racism.

The pending union between Meghan Markle and Prince Harry additionally function to promote the myth of racism being virtually non-existent in places that have induced the world to forget the black bodies gifted as currency, congratulations, and compliments to “powerful” British individuals and institutions.

Because this blog is a meditation of the black female perspective, I will not spend a great amount of time entertaining the white male perspective. I will state that whether to challenge the British monarchy who had a hand (in the very least) in Diana’s murder, or to acquire a legal concubine in a wife with direct black blood—Harry gains at all angles. His spousal selection functions to fictively displace the British as less racist than the United states.

Specifically, Harry and Meghan’s pending nuptials promote the myth of racism being virtually non-existent in places that have induced the world to forget the black bodies gifted as currency, congratulations, and compliments to “powerful” British individuals and institutions. British placement of a biracial black in a designated “place of prestige” is reflective of former President Obama’s eight-year reign, which yielded a pseudo but pervasive white victimhood mollified by Trump and his stealth supporters.

It is imperative to note that Harry will also have no true investment in blackness, despite an implication to the contrary in his white media coverage. His children will most likely bear little to remnants of their black grandparent, and his proximity to his black (ish) wife and her black family will prove a platform for the so-called philanthropy that will aid his emergence as the white savor figure.

Thus, to the white supremacist gaze, it is this white savior figure, personified in Prince Harry’s global function as a white savior and his pending nuptials that makes Meghan Markle “sparkle.”  For Marke’s “sparkle” is determined by the same forces that designated the “royal” family and Harry’s fictive prince status. Before this highly popularized courtship, Markle, an actress, worked on a little known series, and navigated the world with a fluid identity fit for a prince.  

Markle’s relationship with Prince Harry functions similarly to the over-publicized union of Serena Williams and her white-tech husband, to illustrate the happily ever after for the woman maintaining any relation to blackness as solely consummated by a white man—or in Markle’s case, an actual prince. Ironically, Williams was quoted as saying that she “felt like a princess” at her wedding, illustrating the social conditioning that engender black women mutilated by white supremacy to perceive their white male lovers and husbands as “princes.” Serena and Markle collaboratively illustrate the black female body in any varying amount of blackness, veiling a journey to whiteness as a journey to the white dress worn to wed a white men. Furthermore, Williams and Markle’s appeal surfaces in their ability to simultaneously personify the fiction of black female invisibility or ugliness rescued by the personified fairy tale image of the white male prince.

As the former legal concubine to a white male “spouse,” and the offspring of white male penetration of the black female form, Meghan Markle is a physical manifestation of everything Prince Harry represents as a part of European monarchy. So to contest the crux of Dwayne Wong’s Huffington post article entitled “The Upcoming Royal Wedding and Our Colonized Mentalities,” the core issue is not  black reception, but the force-feeding of these images for black consumption by a society who has used the body of Meghan Markle, a real personification of a fictive bi-raciality, to poison the black psyche.

Admittedly, some of the black collective have readily sipped the Koolaid of the upcoming nuptials in a delusional attempt to live vicariously through Markle’s partial African ancestry as she weds a “prince.”Many will perceive themselves as collectively victorious in this “union.” Some will even see themselves as a jewel in Meghan’s illusive crown, whereas in actuality this union functions as the shoes the imperial subject uses to step over a barefoot corpse crucified in abjection veiled as advancement

The desire for inclusion displaces celebration where there should be indifference. But whether living vicariously through Miss Markle or not, the black collective is not what deems Markle revelant. Rather it is the white collective who gains from Markle’s societal displacement as central to a world were she is inevitably and irreversibly marginal—even with a white father, white husband, or white children. Wong’s article is an example of an exteriorized psyche that blames the victim but allows the oppressor to run free and continue to capitalize on their continued colonization.

 

I do however agree that the pending union has unveiled the unhealed scars of a colonialism that never ended but merely changed form. A wound continually opened  by the pervasive strategy of white supremacy, whose social reproduction continues to derive from the loins of the black female body. Social reproduction is a violent action implemented as escapism for whites who desire to treat every act of racism as an isolated incident, and for the mutilated black mind seeking to assemble what Dr. Wade Noble called a “fractured identity” in a pseudo acceptance or inclusion.

In conclusion, Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s “union” is a grotesque image that romanticizes a ubiquitous attack on the black family and black identity as vested in the black female form. Yet, the pervasiveness of this attack denounces the “news” as a means to acquire information, instead exposing white sources as espoused to inoculating inferiority into the black psyche. But more so, the pending “princess” status of Miss Markle proves a catalysts for racists to appear as colorblind humanitarians and the raced and gendered to appear loved in a media lynching of their collective.

To Miss Markle:

your black mother,

not your white father

or fiancee

makes you princess.  

 

Black Power ❤