Meghan Markle and Royal Britain's Long History of Interracial Unions

From interracial unions to sibling rivalry, Prince Harry is following very closely in the footsteps of those grandparents and great grandparents before him. Britain’s royal family has been fond of controversial unions for many generations now, and Prince Harry’s lovely fiancé has still managed to cause a stir all over the world.

Meghan Markle was born and raised worlds away from Buckingham Palace. While Prince Harry spent his rainy London springs engaged in royal family obligations, Meghan was bouncing around with her brown curls and gap-toothed smile on the set of Married with Children, which her father produced for 10 years.

“It’s a very perverse place for a girl to grow up, and I’m there in my Catholic school uniform, no less,” Meghan has joked before about the time she spent on the set. While she might have grown up in a plastic world, this beauty is no plastic girl. At the age of 11, she watched a dishwashing liquid commercial whose tagline declared, “Women all over America are fighting greasy pots and pans.” Two boys from her class said, “Yeah! That’s where women belong! In the kitchen!”

“I remember feeling shocked, and angry, and also just feeling so hurt. It just wasn’t right,” she said of the experience at a United Nations conference where she recounted the story. She sent a letter to her First Lady at the time, Hillary Rodham Clinton. She also wrote to the dishwashing liquid company expressing her feelings and expectations of change. She received letters of encouragement in response to her strength and resolve from Hillary Clinton, Attorney Gloria Allred, and Linda Ellerbee of Nick News, a children’s news program of the early 90s. One month later, the slogan was changed to include all people, not just women.

Years later, while attending Northwestern University as a double major in Theater and International Relations, Meghan’s brilliance landed her an internship at the U.S. Embassy in Argentina. She speaks fluent Castellano—a Spanish dialect spoken mainly in the Rio de la Plata Basin in Argentina and Uruguay. Her brilliance has carried her beyond her roles on television to the United Nations, where she was appointed the UN Women’s Advocate for Political Participation and Leadership.

Meghan’s strong will, genius, and beauty make a lethal combination of attraction for a man of power like Prince Henry. While his past has been peppered with controversy, he has stood the test of time and proven himself to be a highly intelligent, driven, and honorable man. His ten years in the British Royal Army brought him to the rank of Captain and he advocated for the support of wounded soldiers adapting to post-war life. It only makes sense that at this point of maturity and experience he would choose a woman of such caliber as the mixed-race American woman he's fallen so hard for.

While many people all over the world seem to think that this union is unique, there have been many instances where people of African descent have married into the British royal family and carried the line. Charlotte Sophie, or Queen Charlotte as she’s properly called, is a direct descendant of the Margarita de Castro y Sousa family—the black branch of the Portuguese Royal House. Her personal physician has described her in his autobiography as having characteristics that are unmistakably “mixed.” Phillippa of Hainault, wife of Prince Edward, was described as having brown skin all over. Britain has a rich and diverse history of black and mixed-race kings and queens, and Meghan Markle’s addition to that story breaks ground in this modern era.