In a conversation with Mariah Carey on her Spotify podcast, Archetypes, Meghan, the Duchess of Sussex, said that she had always been perceived as a biracial woman (as opposed to a Black woman) until she began dating her now-husband, Prince Harry.
If there’s any time in my life that it’s been more focused on my race, it’s only once I dated my husband,” Meghan said. “Then I started to understand [what it’s like] to be treated like a Black woman because up until then, I had been treated like a mixed woman, and things really shifted.”
Carey and the duchess, who each have one white parent and one Black parent, talked about their mixed-race identities.
“I was reading 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 [that] your experience through the world is how people view you. So she said because she was darker in color, she was being treated as a Black woman, not as a mixed woman,” Meghan said to Carey.
“I think for us it’s so 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,” Meghan continued.
“I always thought it should be, ‘OK, I’m mixed,’ it should be OK to say that, but people want you to choose,” Carey said. “They want to put you in a box and categorize you.