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Meghan Markle and Mariah Carey opened up about being biracial on the second episode of Archetypes . The “Obsessed” singer—who the Duchess of Sussex noted is “mixed, like me”—admitted on the podcast that she struggled to “fit in” when she was younger.
“I didn’t fit in. You know, it would be more of the Black area of town or then you could be where my mom chose to live, were the more, the white neighborhoods. And I didn’t fit in anywhere at all,” Mariah shared.
Meghan replied, “Yeah, I understand that.”
The Duchess admitted to the songstress that she was “so formative for” her when she was young. Meghan said, “Representation matters so much. But when you are a woman and you don’t see a woman who looks like you somewhere in a position of power or influence, or even just on the screen because we know how influential media is, you came onto the scene, I was like ‘Oh, my gosh. Someone... Someone kind of looks like me.’”
The Duchess went on to recall an article she had once read about Halle Berry. “They were asking her how she felt being treated as a mixed race woman in the world. And her response was her saying, ‘Well, your experience through the world is how people view you.’ So she said because she was darker in color, she was being treated as a Black woman, not as a mixed woman,” Meghan said.
The Duchess told Mariah, “And I think for us, it’s so different because we’re light skinned. You’re not treated as a Black woman. You’re not treated as a white woman. You sort of fit in between. 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. Because up until then, I had been treated like a mixed woman. And things really shifted.”
Meghan and Harry, who wed in 2018, began dating back in the summer of 2016 after being introduced by a mutual friend. In November of 2016, the Prince’s communications secretary released a statement saying that the royal’s then-girlfriend had “been subject to a wave of abuse and harassment.” “Some of this has been very public - the smear on the front page of a national newspaper; the racial undertones of comment pieces; and the outright sexism and racism of social media trolls and web article comments,” the statement read.
The royal’s communications secretary also said at the time that “Prince Harry is worried about Ms. Markle’s safety and is deeply disappointed that he has not been able to protect her. It is not right that a few months into a relationship with him that Ms. Markle should be subjected to such a storm. He knows commentators will say this is ‘the price she has to pay’ and that ‘this is all part of the game’. He strongly disagrees. This is not a game - it is her life and his.”