Standing as a person of colour next to my Pākehā husband is an awkward predicament when I field gushy comments from well-meaning people like “your future babies will be so beautiful” and “they’ll have such gorgeous colouring”.
Feebly smiling while cringing on the inside, I’ve come to understand that these words are not complimentary. What is really meant is that our racially ambiguous-looking children will look “just right” — not too dark and not too pale, all thanks to their ethnic dilution.
If, by now, you’re rolling your eyes, you’ve probably never had a deep desire to whitewash your identity, fuelled by an internalised hatred that your race is inferior to the Caucasian majority. And, if you’re on the defensive that commenting on the skin colour of a mixed-race baby is in no way racist, you’re probably in the camp that the recent “royal racists” debacle is nothing but a farce.
To quickly recap, it’s been alleged that in 2019 two members of the British royal family raised “concerns and conversations” about the first child of Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, and how dark Prince Archie’s skin would be. Dubbed the “royal racists”, much debate has flared on whether their remarks were wrong. This debate has reignited with the publication of Omid Scobie’s book Endgame, where the names of the royals he claims were involved were published in the Dutch version of the book leading to it being pulled from the shelves.
Cancel culture on show
In a column for the Daily Mail, Boris Johnson labelled the furore as a “surrender to wokery and cancel culture”.
“Every family is the same. As soon as a baby is born, and with every week that passes, we pore over them — searching pathetically for signs of family continuity. Whose nose is this? Whose eyes? And what is the origin of this mysterious aubergine-coloured hair?” he proclaimed.
Many commentators agreed with the former British prime minister’s sentiments, questioning how it was racist to speculate on the skin colour of a mixed-race baby or changing the narrative to how this was just another example of how the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, were again revealing their “villainous nature”.
But the conversation has gone beyond whether Harry and Meghan are a royal disgrace and whether or not you’re #TeamMeghan is beside the point. As one poster on X aptly remarked, “discussing a mixed-race baby’s skin colour isn’t just about curiosity; it evokes historical racism and objectification. It’s not comparable to hair colour, as skin colour has deep roots in racial stereotyping and discrimination.”
Microaggressions to the fore
As someone who has grown up wishing my skin colour was lighter so I’d feel like I fitted in, I also believe that these conversations over a mixed-race baby’s skin colour are microaggressions. Because, as Natalie Morris puts it in an op-ed for the Guardian, celebrating mixed-race beauty has a problematic side when driven by its “proximity to whiteness” — here, whiteness is assumed to be the ideal and everything else falls into a hierarchy under that.
As uncomfortable as the conversation may be, we must acknowledge that we live in a Eurocentric society, where the colour of our skin determines our value — the lighter it is, the more valuable we’re perceived to be. Colourism, or discrimination against darker-skinned people, can be traced back to colonialism and slavery where lighter-skinned people were associated with superiority and privilege while their darker-skinned counterparts faced heightened discrimination.
The ongoing effects of colourism remain prevalent. Research shows that in the United States, lighter-skinned African Americans and Latinos are perceived more favourably, afforded better employment prospects, have an increased likelihood of marriage and greater social mobility. An article published this year in the Ethnic and Racial Studies journal considered the relationship between racism-induced stress and poor health outcomes among black British women, finding that light-skin privilege invariably leads to better health outcomes.
The same publication also suggested that Meghan Markle would have experienced a relative loss of privilege when she moved from the United States (where she would have been perceived as being of mixed race) to the United Kingdom (where she was perceived as being more black).
“Fair and lovely”
Even in non-Western countries like India, colonialism has left a lasting legacy on ideals of beauty standards, including aspiration for whiteness as a symbol of status and social acceptance. This is a country where the product “Fair & Lovely”, a skin-lightening cosmetic product, was introduced by Hindustan Unilever in 1975. Despite much backlash, the product is still around and was only rebranded — to “Glow & Lovely” — in 2020.
But you don’t need research to back up these claims when there are so many jarring accounts from people of colour about their lived experiences. As Oscar award-winning actor Lupita Nyong’o recounted in a BBC interview in 2019, she was once told at an audition that she was “too dark” for television, going on to remark that colourism was the “daughter of racism” in “a world that rewards lighter skin over darker skin”.
The dominant Eurocentric beauty ideals have a profound psychological impact on people of colour, spurring feelings of inadequacy that lead to low self-esteem and body dissatisfaction. It’s the dominant race that gets to cherry-pick what is deemed as acceptable, like the rise in lip filler injections to achieve plump, fuller lips, a racial feature for which black women have previously been demeaned.
So, although Boris Johnson may consider the latest royal scandal a “mockery of the liberal values that really matter”, speculating on the skin colour of a royal baby is markedly different from wondering whether it will be short or tall or inherit its grandfather’s famed ears. It has more to do with the baby’s perceived value, reducing its identity to a simplistic notion of race that reinforces harmful hierarchies rooted in white supremacy.
Feel free to call Meghan a villain because of #DressGate, but don’t vilify her or her husband because some seriously misguided people thought it was appropriate to comment on her child’s skin colour.
