"Britain’s relationship with race will change forever," screamed the headline above a Guardian column after news of Prince Harry's engagement to Meghan Markle broke on Monday, but the excitement might be premature — Markle will likely be instructed by royal advisers to hide that she is biracial and probably won't end up doing much to improve the rocky race relations in the United Kingdom, according to two noted British scholars.
“She won’t be
allowed to be a black princess. The only way she can be accepted is to
pass for white,” Kehinde Andrews, an associate professor of sociology at
Birmingham City University who launched the first black studies degree
in Europe, told Newsweek. “If there are people who are celebrating, it’s a bit naive, and they’ll be very disappointed.”
Markle, whose mother is black
and whose father is white, is being touted by some as a beacon of
progress for the United Kingdom and its royal family, which has an
exclusively white lineage with the exception of Princess Sophie
Charlotte, who married King George III in 1761 and was rumored to have
African ancestry.
The family's
bloodline reflects that of the the United Kingdom, where 87.1 percent of
the population is white and just 3 percent is black.
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