It’s sadly unsurprising how little it takes for Meghan Markle to be attacked online, but logging onto social media this morning to see which part of her and Harry’s new documentary has made the timelines even we were taken aback.
‘Why is it ok for Meghan to mock our culture in this way? Or does racism only work one way?’ Sarah Vine tweeted, to over 20,000 likes, alongside a clip from the Netflix series where Meghan re-enacts the first time she curtsied for the Queen.
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‘This America, is why we don’t like her,’ Sophie Corcoran added – to which Tory MP Tim Loughton quote tweeted saying ‘I am ashamed that this deeply embarrassing couple bear the title of our great county. It is time to take the title back from someone so clearly lacking any respect’. The MP has since gone on to join the call by fellow MP Bob Seely to bring forward legislation in an attempt to strip the Duke and Duchess of Sussex of their royal titles – an interesting priority for our elected government during a cost-of-living crisis.
Watching the clip in the context of the entire documentary, most viewers would hardly bat an eyelid. It’s actually an endearing moment where Meghan is discussing how little she knew about British royal life, and how unprepared she was for the formalities of meeting senior royals. Sure, there’s an awkward silence in the air as Meghan demonstrates how long and deep, she curtsied – something a Brit might cringe at slightly watching – but that was the point of the joke, she had no clue what she was doing and so her curtsy was slightly ridiculous.
To most viewers, the clear implication is that Meghan is mocking herself, and even provided us with a fun tidbit of royal BTS gossip when she noted that Princess Eugenie, with husband Jack Brooksbank and mother Sarah Ferguson, reassured her ‘You did great!’
It’s moments like that where you can see how earnestly Meghan wanted to impress the royal family and realise how daunting it must be to be thrust into their world without real direction on royal etiquette. Why then, is it being turned into this heinous moment of supposed mockery at ‘British culture’, so much as to be ludicrously dubbed ‘racism’?
First things first, even if Meghan were mocking royal etiquette around curtsying, that would not be ‘racist’. The royal family are not a marginalised group that one can discriminate against to the effect of dismantling their power or privilege, to suggest so is frankly laughable. Incessantly finding any excuse to attack a biracial woman on the other hand? That’s another story.
If we're talking culture, taking the piss out of someone for needing to curtsy to their nan is more British than anything.
Secondly, does anyone really consider curtsying ‘British culture’? Is it a pillar of our social norms, a curtsy with a side of fish and chips? Or is there really only one family in the entire UK for which curtsying is a normal activity, a family with more wealth than we could comprehend whose lives the rest of us fund with taxes. Perhaps there are regular families that curtsy to each other as a greeting, but I would argue even if Meghan were taking the piss out of people who curtsy, that’s probably the most British thing she could do.
Ultimately, the reaction to this innocuous scene proves the point of their entire documentary. In the three parts we’ve seen so far, they’ve broken down the history of colonialism that the monarchy rests on, the structural racism that was thus embedded in Britain and how Meghan’s experience speaks to a larger issue of a modern racist culture war, the flames of which were stoked by anti-migrant rhetoric that took root during Brexit.
These are the conversations we should be reflecting on, and yet critics are honing in on harmless jokes and repurposing them out of context to further embed a narrative that Meghan doesn’t deserve British support. And this is exactly how negative narratives spread against Meghan in the first place, with a bunch of unnecessary, sensationalised opinions that painted her out to be manipulative or disrespectful or unworthy of a royal title, all part of a toxic puzzle that ultimately turned people against her.
This is how racism often works too, implicit, and subtle – and so before joining the chorus of hate, it’s wise to consider what’s guiding these unnecessarily dramatic opinions about Meghan’s character.