Meghan Markle and the Problem of Tokenism

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Simmering underneath the surface of Oprah’s bombshell-loaded interview with Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, and Prince Harry, there’s an all-too familiar narrative: that of the token-diverse Black person who’s marginalized by the establishment that initially welcomed her as a symbol of its progressiveness. Looking at the way Meghan was treated by the media and (according to her and Harry) by royal family members themselves, we can see three social forces at play in her experience: tokenism, colorism, and anti-black racism. And the case of Meghan Markle reveals just how interconnected these three problems are. We can see this same tokenism cycle in countless contexts, including films and TV shows, which have a huge impact (for better and worse) on our collective assumptions about race. Here’s our Take on how Meghan’s experience illustrates how these three forces (tokenism, colorism, and anti-black racism) mutually thrive off and fuel each other to maintain existing racial hierarchies.

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