I am half-Indian and half-white, which ends up confusing a lot of people. I’ve had teachers swear up and down that I must be Greek. I’ve had Mexican-Americans come up to me and assume that I speak Spanish because of the way I look. I get random people guessing that I’m Italian, Middle-Eastern, Native American and more. A hairstylist recently looked at me and asked, “Are you Muslim?” (as if “Muslim” is a race). All of which to say… I feel like I fundamentally understand Meghan Markle in certain aspects. I’m sure that as someone who is half-white and half-black, as someone who “presents” as a somewhat elusive ethnicity, she’s probably had to deal with racial microaggressions and weird racial assumptions all her life. Meghan talks about that and more in the April issue of Allure.
If you don’t already know Meghan Markle from her role on Suits, you definitely know her because of her recent romance with Prince Harry. And their fondness for each other isn’t the only thing they have in common. Like her royal beau, she too has a face of freckles — and she’s opening up about her appreciation for them, along with her skin tone, in Allure‘s April issue.
“I have the most vivid memories of being seven years old and my mom picking me up from my grandmother’s house,” Markle tells Allure. “There were the three of us, a family tree in an ombré of mocha next to the caramel complexion of my mom and light-skinned, freckled me,”
But the actress shares that it wasn’t until later in life that she began to examine her identity based on her skin’s color — and to this day, she’s constantly being questioned about her heritage.
“I remember the sense of belonging, having nothing to do with the color of my skin. It was only outside the comforts of home that the world began to challenge those ideals. I took an African-American studies class at Northwestern where we explored colorism; it was the first time I could put a name to feeling too light in the black community, too mixed in the white community. For castings, I was labeled ‘ethnically ambiguous.’ Was I Latina? Sephardic? ‘Exotic Caucasian’?”
Which is why today, Markle celebrates not only her skin tone, but her freckles as well — a trait that she says she tries not to cover up. “Add the freckles to the mix and it created quite the conundrum. To this day, my pet peeve is when my skin tone is changed and my freckles are airbrushed out of a photo shoot.”
So for all of her ‘freckle-faced friends’ (we assume that includes Harry), she has a few words of wisdom: “I will share with you something my dad told me when I was younger: ‘A face without freckles is a night without stars.’”
[From People]
I have freckles too, which confuses people. It happens when I get any kind of sun on my face, I’ll get a smattering of freckles on my nose and cheeks. I love when that happens. But yes, I feel Meghan on the racially/ethnically ambiguous thing. Like, just looking at her, I would think that she was a mix of more than black and white. You know what I think is cool? That we’ll get to have these kinds of conversations around a royal bride, potentially. If Meghan and Harry do get engaged and do marry, Meghan will have a platform to discuss these kinds of racial issues. That’s exciting to me, because I never thought a Windsor prince would ever end up married to anyone other than an aristocratic-looking blonde, you know?
Photos courtesy of WENN.
Source: celebitchy.com
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