Almost as soon as Suits star Meghan Markle’s relationship with Prince Harry became public knowledge late last year, the actress became the focus of abusive trolling and media criticism.
Many of the comments thrown at Meghan, who is mixed race, had blatantly racist undertones, leading Prince Harry to release an unprecedented statement through Kensington Palace to condemn ‘the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments.’
The actress went on to address her experiences as a biracial woman in a thoughtful essay for Elle magazine, explaining how people often question ‘what’ she is and ‘where’ her parents are from, making assumptions based on the colour of her skin.
Now, speaking to Allure magazine, Meghan has further explored these assumptions, and the impact they have had upon her Hollywood career, from casting mistakes to magazine airbrushing.
Describing the feeling of ‘belonging, having nothing to do with the colour of my skin’ while growing up with her African-American mother and a Caucasian father, Meghan revealed that it wasn’t until she left home for university that she started to consider questions of race.
‘I took an African-American studies class at Northwestern [University] where we explored colourism,’ she told Allure. ‘It was the first time I could put a name to feeling too light in the black community, too mixed in the white community.’
When she began to pursue a career on screen, casting directors kept trying and failing to place her in boxes. ‘For castings, I was labelled “ethnically ambiguous.” Was I Latina? Sephardic? “Exotic Caucasian?”’ she explained. ‘Add the freckles to the mix and it created quite the conundrum.’
‘To this day, my pet peeve is when my skin tone is changed and my freckles are airbrushed out of a photo shoot,’ she added, sharing an anecdote from her childhood: ‘For all my freckle-faced friends out there, I will share with you something my dad told me when I was younger: ‘A face without freckles is a night without stars.”’
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