Meghan, Duchess of Sussex felt like she was “treated like a Black woman” for the first time when she started dating Prince Harry.
The former actress, who has a white father and a Black mother, spoke to Mariah Carey about their shared experiences of growing up biracial in the latest episode of her Archetypes podcast, which was released on Tuesday.
During the discussion, Meghan noted that she had always been treated like a “mixed woman” but that changed when she started dating the British royal in 2016 and was then viewed as “a Black woman.”
“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,” she said. “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.”
The pop diva admitted that feeling forced to choose which race you best identify with is an “interesting thing.”
“I always thought it should be O.K. to say I’m mixed. Like it should be O.K. to say that. But people want you to choose,” she added, to which Meghan agreed.
The 41-year-old compared her experience to that of Oscar-winning actress Halle Berry, who is biracial and has a darker skin tone.
“I had read this article about Halle Berry, and 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 colour, she was being treated as a Black woman, not as a mixed woman,” Meghan recalled. “And I think for us, it’s very 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.”