Meghan Markle is opening up about all the discrimination she watched her mother face when she was a child.
The Duchess of Sussex spoke about her experiences growing up as a biracial woman and the racist remarks she saw hurled towards her mother, Doria Ragland, in Netflix’s Harry & Meghan. In the second episode, Doria gives her first public interview since her daughter married Prince Harry back in 2018.
Ragland described Meghan as an “old soul” and straight-A student, who she raised her in Los Angeles and shared custody with her ex-husband, Thomas Markle. Growing up, Meghan spent the week with her mom and weekends with her dad, recalling the traumatizing exchange she witnessed when a stranger called her mother the N-word.
As Meghan drove by the Hollywood Bowl, she revealed that she was last at the venue for a concert with her mom when the incident occurred.
As Doria and Meghan were exiting the parking lot, Meghan said, “My mom honked her horn, this woman was taking a long time to figure out how to get out, and the woman turned around and screamed the N-word at my mom.”
“I just remember my mom, the grip that her hands had on the steering wheel,” Markle recalled. “You could it was so tight, like the knuckles get all white, and she was just silent the rest of the drive home. We never talked about it.”
Meghan continued, explaining what it’s like being biracial: “[It’s] very different to be a minority but not be treated as a minority right off the bat. Obviously, now, people are very aware of my race because they made it such an issue when I went to the U.K. But before that, most people didn’t treat me like a ‘Black woman.’ So that talk didn’t have to happen for me.”
“As a parent, in hindsight, absolutely, I would like to go back and have that kind of real conversation about how the world sees you,” Doria said.
Meghan also spoke about how her mother would be mistaken for her nanny when she was small.
“I just remember my mom telling me stories about taking me to the grocery store and women going, ‘Whose child is that? You must be the,” She’s like, ‘It’s my child,’ ” Markle said.
“‘No ― you must be the nanny, where’s her mom,’” she remembered people asking. “Cause I was really fair skinned and my mom, darker.”
Volume one of Harry & Meghan is now streaming on Netflix. Volume two premieres on Thursday, Dec. 15.
