You’re getting to know someone. You enter into a relationship. You receive a barrage of hateful and racist abuse online. Yep, that last part is, and should be, unacceptable. But the reality for Suits star Meghan Markle, after she found herself in the midst of a media storm, when it was revealed she was in a relationship with Prince Harry.
In an unprecedented move, Prince Harry stepped in to condemn the divisive rhetoric played out, in which he criticised the ‘abuse and harassment’ his girlfriend had experienced and the ‘racial undertones of comment pieces and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments’. Meghan even wrote a powerful essay in December for ELLE about her personal experience as a mixed race woman - whose mother is African American and father is Caucasian.
And now the 35-year-old actress, lifestyle entrepreneur and advocate for UN Women has resurfaced a very important article she originally published in 2015.
To mark Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Meghan shared a story of her family’s history with racism on her website The Tig, titled 'Champions of Change'.
She starts off by recounting her grandparent’s move from Ohio to California, when her mother was around 7. After the family of five took a road trip to Los Angeles she remembers her grandfather telling her, “When we went to Kentucky Fried Chicken, we had to go to the back for ‘coloreds.’ The kitchen staff handed me the chicken from the back door and we ate in the parking lot. That’s just what it was.”
‘That story still haunts me,’ Meghan says. ‘It reminds me of how young our country is. How far we’ve come and how far we still have to come. It makes me think of the countless black jokes people have shared in front of me, not realizing I am mixed, unaware that I am the ethnically ambiguous fly on the wall.
‘It makes me wonder what my parents experienced as a mixed race couple. It echoes the time my mom and I were leaving a concert at The Hollywood Bowl, and a woman called her the “N” word because she was taking too long to pull out of the parking spot. I remember how hot my skin felt. How it scorched the air around me.’
‘To Martin Luther King Jr., to Harvey Milk, to Gloria Steinem and Cesar Chavez, to my mom and dad for choosing each other not for the“color of their skin but the content of their character,” to all of you champions of change
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