There’s a particular look that women of colour know well. The tutting and the pursed lips. The eye rolls and the raised brows. The averted gaze and crossed arms. Their body language and unspoken words are designed to do one particular thing: Put us in our place.
As women of colour, we experience it everywhere we go. You might call it a microaggression, a chip on our shoulder or even a figment of our imagination, but it dictates our personal lives and careers, erecting barriers and keeping us within the confines of what people expect non-white women to be.
After the Queen’s death, when members of the Royal Family met mourners outside Balmoral, I saw this look again in how some of the public interacted with Meghan Markle. While some greeted her with the same warmth as they extended to Kate Middleton, others gave her a more icy reception. One video appeared to show a woman folding her hands while Meghan engaged with those around her, while others appeared to show royal fans shaking their heads and deliberately looking away to make their disapproval clear.
After debuting in August, the release of new episode will be paused during this official mourning period.
The racist treatment of Meghan Markle is plain to see: it's documented across our media, to be found in derogatory headlines and the obsession of some talk shows (and their hosts) with her life.
The double standard between her and Kate Middleton is perhaps where this pernicious racism has been most exposed, and the past week was no different. Whereas Kate Middleton was seen as altruistic and motherly for not attending the palace following the Queen's death, Meghan Markle was considered selfish and inconsiderate. It's abundantly clear that in the eyes of some, Black women can never win – especially ones who dare to marry into the symbol of (white) elitism that is the royal family.
Women of colour who live and work in white spaces know how this treatment – often at the hands of white women – can come to dominate and limit our lives. As a mixed-race, visibly Muslim woman I have felt the brunt of this as the only Muslim on my course at university, as the only Muslim in some of my first jobs, and even at the hands of some members of my family who consider me foreign and threatening for wearing a hijab.
Wearing a headscarf made me hyper-visible and invisible to those around me. They wanted things from me but they didn’t want to know me.
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When I saw how some of the public reacted to Meghan and the gaslighting on social media that came in defence of it, I felt the full force of what it means to be a woman of colour in a country as divided and elitist as Britain. What Meghan Markle faces at the hands of the press and the British public who interact with her is what women of colour across the country are met with in job interviews and workplaces, from partners’ families who are unwelcoming of their race and from strangers on the street. It is what we internalise as we are systemically and purposefully beaten down by a country and a system that seeks to disenfranchise those who don’t conform to its narrow confines of Britishness.
The first time I experienced a look like this was when I went out of the house wearing a hijab for the first time. As a mixed-race teenager, I had been unknowingly passing as white my entire life, and I didn’t realise that the adults around me – in the supermarket, on the bus, and even my teachers at school – could be capable of regarding me in a way dripping with such loathing. It made me curl up into myself and feel uncomfortable – and even frightened – in white spaces that I had once inhabited with such ease. It made me feel like a foreigner in my own home town: something threatening and repulsive that grown-ups diverted their children’s eyes from in case my otherness was contagious.
I experienced it again at university as one of the only non-white, state-school-educated students on my course. When I tried to make conversation, I was considered something taboo that nobody wanted to associate with. My overt, visible foreignness wasn’t cool enough. I couldn’t join in with my coursemates’ conversations about second homes in the south of France or which renowned private school they had attended, and I wasn’t there on the nights out at the pub with our seminar leaders. I couldn’t laugh about how drunk so-and-so had got last night, and so I became silent and reclusive again. I avoided situations where I would be the only person of colour because the reaction I received from the white people around me made me feel like I wanted to break out of my own skin.
That girl is back.
Now, in my late twenties, I realise that as a protective mechanism, I have surrounded myself with friends and family who share my marginalised status because I find solace in our mutual experiences, our joint oppression. But the impact of this prevalent racism is still etched into my mind: it makes me second-guess myself, avoid opportunities and sell myself short. Even now, when I am in a shop or a job interview or on the tube, and I am met with that same look that Meghan Markle was subject to last week, I am shocked by how it impacts me. How it makes me question all over again the right to exist in the country I was born in.
By no means am I a defender of the monarchy or the imperialism it represents as an institution, but the rampant anti-blackness that follows Meghan Markle wherever she goes is something I find hard to ignore - especially given how much of it reminds me of the Islamophobia I endure on a daily basis.
People who protest that the media-fuelled hatred towards Meghan Markle is unrelated to her race seem blinded by their loyalty to a monarchy whose history itself tells us that racism is very much consistent with their track record. It is plainly there for us to see. Given the extent to which communities of colour are already disadvantaged in this country, is it really such a stretch to consider that a system of inherited power, where privilege and control are passed along and preserved amongst only a very small elite, could espouse some outdated and prejudiced ideas?
But the reality is that, contrary to the version of Britishness that the government clings onto, people of colour, especially women, are deliberately disenfranchised at every level in this country, and we navigate our lives under insurmountable inequalities and barriers.
To be a woman of colour in the UK is to be constantly bombarded by the twin hands of misogyny and racism. After all, if even a millionaire, mixed-race princess faces such racism at the hands of the British public and media that she chooses to leave the country, then what does that say about what women of colour with far less privilege are forced to endure every single day?
“I doubted myself"
