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After discussing motherhood and female ambition with Serena Williams on the first episode of her new podcast Archetypes, Meghan Markle invited Mariah Carey on the show, where the two discussed their unique experiences as light-skinned biracial women.
On the subject of growing up biracial, Carey described the experience of not feeling like she fit in anywhere when she was a kid. Meghan then noted that, being so light-skinned, she didn’t feel like she was treated like a white woman or a Black woman growing up—until she started dating Prince Harry. “I mean, if there’s any time in my life that it’s been more focused on my race, it’s only once I started dating my husband. Then I started to understand what it was like to be treated like a Black woman,” Meghan said, via People. “Because up until then, I had been treated like a mixed woman. And things really shifted.”
You may remember that back when Meghan and Harry’s relationship first went public, the British tabloids were guilty of printing more than one pretty racist headline. The Daily Mail’s famous “straight outta Compton” article, which implied that Meghan and her mother came from crime-riddled gangland, was one egregious example. Meghan Markle and Prince Harry also told Oprah Winfrey that Harry’s own family had worried about as-yet-unborn Archie’s future skin color.
In fact, in bonus footage of the Oprah interview (via BBC), Harry admitted that racism was a “large part” of why he and Meghan decided to leave the UK and their royal duties.
