Meghan Markle and Mariah Carey are opening up about how they’ve been treated as biracial women.
On the second episode of her Spotify podcast, “Archetypes,” the Duchess of Sussex and five-time Grammy winner reflected on their experience being mixed race and not fitting into one category.
“I didn’t fit in. I didn’t fit in,” said Mariah, 53, who noted that she “moved like 14 times” when she was growing up. “You know, it would be more of the Black area of town or then you could be where my mom chose to live, were the more, the white neighborhoods. And I didn’t fit in anywhere at all.”
“Yeah, I understand that,” Meghan, 41, replied, sharing that the pop star was “so formative” for her.
“Representation matters so much,” she added. “But when you are a woman and you don’t see a woman who looks like you somewhere in a position of power or influence, or even just on the screen — because we know how influential media is — you came onto the scene, I was like ‘Oh, my gosh. Someone kind of looks like me.'”
Mariah asked Meghan if she “could tell” that Mariah was “Black and white” when she was growing up, to which Meghan replied, “Yes, I could feel that. Yeah, even at that young age.”
The mom of two went on to recall an article she read when she was young about Halle Berry, who had been asked about “how she felt being treated as a mixed-race woman in the world.”
Meghan continued, “And her response was her saying, ‘Well, 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.”
“And I think for us, it’s very different because we’re light-skinned,” she added. “You’re not treated as a Black woman. You’re not treated as a white woman. You sort of fit in between.”
The former actress then shared that she only started being “treated like a Black woman” once she began dating Prince Harry, whom she married in 2018.
“I mean, if there’s any time in my life that it’s been more focused on my race, it’s only once I started dating my husband,” Meghan told Mariah. “Then I started to understand what it was like to be treated like a Black woman. Because up until then, I had been treated like a mixed woman. And things really shifted.”
“That’s an interesting thing: a ‘mixed woman,'” Mariah said in reply, adding that she “always thought it should be okay to say I’m mixed. Like, it should be okay to say that. But people want you to choose.”
“Yes,” Meghan said in agreement.
See more from the conversation in the full podcast episode, below.
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