Racism Directed Against Meghan Markle Matters

Meghan McCain reminds us that successful Black people are targets.

Image: Fuzheado CC

Last week, Meghan Markle released a trailer for her new, how-to decorating/cooking and interview Netflix show, “With Love, Meghan.” The series looks light and innocuous—but that didn’t stop nepo-baby and would-be celebrity Meghan McCain from launching into an unhinged vituperative rant, in which she fumed that Markle had “disrespected the royal family.” She also insisted that Americans do not want fun decoration advice but instead want content that is “real, raw, uncensored.”

America, of course, would not exist if it were not for disrespecting the royal family. And since we just elected a reality television star and compulsive liar to the presidency again, it seems silly to insist that the US is especially wedded to rawness, or for that matter to reality.

This is all beside the point, though. McCain’s reasons for disliking Markle don’t make sense because they aren’t reasons; they’re just excuses. And she needs an excuse because the actual reason she hates Markle is (a) Markle is Black and (b) Markle is successful.

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Lots of people hate Markle because she’s Black.

McCain’s hardly the only white person who has been sent into a rage spiral at the spectacle of Meghan Markle daring to exist and have nice things. Ever since Markle married Prince Harry, the second son of England’s King Charles, she has been the focus of an international, coordinated, constant, and absolutely unhinged stream of abuse and bullying.

Markle’s noted that the hatred has been most intense during her pregnancies; during the first of these the attacks were so relentless, and so inescapable, she experienced intense depression for which she had to seek medical care. The Royal Family was unsympathetic and unhelpful in dealing with the tabloid press driving the abuse. That’s why Harry and Meghan distanced themselves physically and emotionally, moving to the United States—an act which constitutes “disrespecting the royal family” in the mind of unAmerican royal lickspittle Meghan McCain.

A good deal of the abuse Markle has received has been explicitly racist; tabloids have referred to her as having “exotic DNA” and have compared her child to a chimpanzee. Often though the racism is slightly more subtextual. As in McCain’s rant, it takes the form of questioning Markle’s authenticity, which is also a way to question her right to, or entitlement to, her social position.

Kate Middleton, the wife of Harry’s older brother William, has also been targeted for abuse over the years. But it hasn’t been as relentless nor as outraged, in part because Kate is a white woman, and the British and American press both expect British princesses (and queens) to be white women. Kate as princess is seen as natural and normal; she is where she should be.

Markle, in contrast, is out of place, disrespectful, not real. “I would have told her to do a show helping bring fresh food to food deserts in low-income neighborhoods,” McCain sneered. Markle, like most royals, does a good bit of charitable work, but that’s not really McCain’s concern. Instead, McCain thinks that Markle can only be “real” if she is in an impoverished milieu. Because, for McCain, Black people are only really themselves when they’re associated with poverty.

White entitlement requires Black subservience

Markle of course is not herself poor; she was a successful and wealthy actor before she married Prince Harry, and now she’s a member of the royal family. She and Harry have a net worth of around $60 million. That’s not in Bill Gates or Elon Musk territory, but it’s enough that you might wonder why I’m writing an article about the discrimination she faces. Markle is a wealthy, powerful celebrity. What can she really know of racism or stigma?

It's not just Meghan McCain who frames wealthy Black people as out of touch from any real experience of racism or oppression. Radicals on the left—including Black radicals—are often dismissive of affluent Black people, framing them as collaborators in white supremacy disconnected from their roots and communities. Black sociologist E. Franklin Frazier, for example, argued that the Black bourgeoisie (like Booker T. Washington) were self-deluded when they argued that entrepreneurship and respectability politics were a path to equality.

Frazier wasn’t wrong, necessarily. But it’s worth emphasizing that he wasn’t wrong in part because success makes Black people into targets.

White people generally feel entitled to wealth and leadership. At the least, they feel entitled to more wealth and more power than Black people. As long as Black people remain poor and clearly deferential, white people can feel comfortable—which is why segregationists were generally fine having Black domestic servants in their homes. Segregationists didn’t actually want to be isolated from Black people; they were perfectly happy having Black people in their homes, as long as those Black people were forced into a posture of permanent subservience.

Black success, on the other hand, is a threat to white prerogatives. Whites claimed that lynchings were used to punish Black people who assaulted white women. But this was a lie. Often, white people targeted successful Black businesspeople for mob violence. Whites wanted to destroy competition, but they also wanted to put Black people in what they saw as their place—ie, subservient and penniless.

You can see the same logic in the current right wing moral panic about “DEI.” The DEI panic is based on the assumption that any non-white person in a position of power or authority is an unqualified affront to meritocracy—which in this context means an affront to white supremacy.

More, you see the same logic in the violent anger that has been directed at Markle ever since she married Prince Harry. “Princess” is supposed to be a title, and a social position, reserved for white people like hereditary scion-of-Senators Meghan McCain. When a Black woman takes that title and that position, it’s seen as a usurpation and a violation.

Racism can’t just be reduced to class struggle

The point here isn’t just that racism can be directed at wealthy people. The point is that racist policing of relatively well-off Black people is a core strategy of white supremacy. Keeping Black people out of positions of power and framing Black people in positions of power as a problem which needs to be highlighted, denounced, and rectified, is central to the legitimization of white power—and of capitalist power under white supremacy.

This is why I think it’s misguided when Democratic leaders, and/or progressives, argue that culture war issues are a distraction from the real material issues of class. I’ve discussed this before, but it’s worth reiterating: intimidation and oppression of Black people is not simply a distraction. It’s a goal in itself.

Or to put it another way, and to make the stakes as clear as possible: white resistance to redistributive policies is in large part driven by a stubborn fear that a more equal society will be a society in which Black people can attend Harvard, own businesses, host Netflix specials, and become princesses. For them, “illegitimate elites” is a synonym for “nonwhite people in positions of power.” They don’t hate the rich; often they want to be the rich. They hate (successful, non-deferential) Black people.

Meghan McCain’s half-assed class critique of Meghan Markle is intended to be, and is in fact, a distraction from McCain’s racism. Opposing that racism isn’t some sort of inconvenience which we can easily step around. Opposing racism directly has to be a priority for any politics of justice, freedom, and equality.

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