Two sides of a complicated Black girl love story….
I am really trying to think my way into how to speak about the Harry and Meghan series on Netflix--or that show about"H" and "Meg" as it turns out. Might as well use nicknames since we are getting familiar. Since they have us deep in their living rooms and backyards and kitchen tables. There are almost too many points to make, too many analytics, big and small, to attend to across the six episodes. The think pieces will write themselves; apologies if this little letter adds to that pile.
The DiscourseTM is fixated on how Meghan does or does not identify as a Black woman. The language here is very precious and fuzzy, raw and imprecise. Ask me and I’ll break some hearts and say: have mercy, of course she identifies as a Black woman. She has said as much. She also identifies more explicitly as "mixed-race" or "bi-racial." And/also, I am not sure what these terms mean for her or for us, who she is trying to signify to. And/also I am wondering how it matters. Not why it matters, because it does. But how does it matter and to whom?
Meg says she wasn't treated as a Black girl/woman, and she really means Black girl since she says this in the part of the documentary about her childhood and adolescence. By the time she is trying out for acting roles, she is having conversations with her agent and with herself about not fitting in to Hollywood stereotypes about what a Black woman looks or sounds like. And I wonder about her saying that and Zora Neale Hurston saying the same thing about her transition from living in the Black town of Eatonville in Florida to living in Baltimore, Maryland, Washington, DC and later Harlem, New York. So I am wondering what does it mean when someone says they weren't treated "as Black [girl]" and what are they indexing there? I keep getting stuck at what is or is not assumed in being treated like a "Black girl"?
I agree that Meg didn’t mean it in a favorable way. As in, to be treated like a Black girl is to be wronged, somehow. Or, to bring in the other Meg in the Discourse this week, it is to be treated like a liar, like a traitor, like a threat, and, ultimately, to be subject to spectacular violence at the cost of existing in the world and then not to be believed when you speak the truth of that violence out loud. Black women have been writing about Meg, in support of her, and discussing the proceedings of the trial: Jemele Hill wrote about her for the Atlantic, Jamilah Lemieux wrote about her for BET, Treva B. Lindsey (author of the book about Black women and violence, America Goddam: Violence, Black Women, and the Struggle for Justice) both wrote and appeared on Nightline to discuss and describe the experience Meg is having, noting:
“I’m both exhausted and infuriated by the indifference and the hatred spewed toward her. Our refusal to engage sends a message to Black women that we need to silently endure and unequivocally protect those who harm us. We cannot continue to sweep things under the rug. Our harmful experiences aren’t an inconvenience or a distraction.”
I wouldn’t be surprised if this specter of gendered racial violence, silencing, and persecution (especially when you speak up), of physical and sexual violence enacted on you by both white men, women, AND Black men, is exactly the ontology of Black girlhood that Meg was referencing when she said that she’d escaped such treatment—until she arrived at Buckingham Palace.
There is a new book out: Corinne T. Field and LaKisha Michelle Simmons, eds., The Global History of Black Girlhood, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2022). In it, Field and Simmons write that.
"More than adding age to the familiar list of identity categories based on gender, race, and class, Black girls’ studies is an epistemological revolution that demands a new understanding of who can produce suggests, this Black girlhood?"
They outline a set of principles by which to think about Black girlhood as a practice and as a radical challenge to the known world: a challenge to the authority of adulthood, a challenge to biological time (childhood, adolescence/pubescence, adulthood), a challenge to attend to expressive culture and expressions of self-making (particularly ones maligned as incidental to radical politics as femme affectation has been; a point Omi'seke Tinsley makes in her new book The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival), a challenge to who counts as "woman" and what are the trappings of being a "girl" (caretaking as a marker in Black girls lives that often pre-dates womanhood, but also the work of affirming Black trans girlhood).
Keeping these principles in mind, who is the Black girl Meghan had in mind when she said she wasn't treated as a "Black girl" and how do we understand that figure as an ontology that actually doesn't discount Meghan's Blackness (and isn't her discounting her own Blackness), but is a framing of the place Black girls have had in society as wayward, wrong, a problem, an attitude, and also (in some ways, therefore) a radical position of possibility and refusal?
In other words, Meg as a mixed-race girl of African descent and her decision to sue the Mail, speak up about her miscarriage, escape with Harry (although Harry does claim this as a decision he made and not her) is part of a broader Black girl refusal to be cowed, a refusal to abide, a refusal to be silent. AND/ALSO her phenotype and class privilege meant she missed out on some of the more violent and punitive and surveilling repercussions of being marked as wayward or wrong, and that privilege continued to protect her (as in her access to classed resources whether that be Tyler Perry, publicists, or a noble title) even as she and her family fled the monster that is the British press and the passive neglect of the Firm. This privilege of phenotype and even of class (because the class of hip hop celebrity is not quite the same as the class of generational nobility) is not the same for Meg Thee, never was, never can be. And Meg(han)’s comment about not being treated "as a Black girl" — as essentially Meg Thee Stallion is being treated RIGHT NOW — reveals that Meg(han) knew this distinction intimately even as a child and, yes, the subtext of that moment in the documentary is that she WOULD have preferred to continue to fall back on those privileges for the rest of her life, to have distant contact with gendered racism of antiblackness rather than the close contact she received from the British press calling her everything but a child of God.
She would have preferred to be seen as an advocate for the Meg Thee’s of the world, but perhaps not be treated like one—even one as beloved and celebrated as Tina Snow.
To be a royal means something to the Duchess. It meant something to others as well. In "On Meghan and Harry," Christienna Fryar also wrote a bit about the Duke and Duchess over at "The Stories" and as a Black American woman who now lives and teaches Black studies/history in Britain, I'm inclined to quote her at length:
"They saw her as confirmation that they lived in a particular version of Britain that they very much wish to live in, and what has happened to her demonstrates how much that Britain does not exist. If anything, it’s not the vile racists who cannot handle the presence of any African heritage within the symbols of Britain who keep this situation at the cultural forefront, or her defenders who see the situation for what it is. It may instead be the very many British people who see themselves as reasonable and good people by dint of their nationality, for whom it is truly difficult to accept what this situation means for the country they live in, who have kept this situation at such a fever pitch." - Christienna Fryar, On Meghan and Harry at The Stories
I am not going to judge Meghan for wanting to be a biracial symbol for the monarchy. First of all, I am of the same Disney Princess generation and I would be lying if I pretended I didn't get it. I truly do empathize. She was sitting in her truth (or at least the truth she wants to share with us) and I don’t have to like it or find it appealing to understand it. And her truth makes utter sense. As a mixed-race Black girl who grew up in California, time and place removed from Caribbean community that could care less about royalty (although Caribbean folks, don't also lie and pretend the monarchy isn't a thing), time and place removed from the Black Delta South, where Black folks know slavery was just yesterday and white people who call themselves kings and masters are ALWAYS spoiled fruit, her princess dreams fit. She won’t be the first Black person to be invested in the (neo)liberal promise that integration into institutions will reshape those institutions, and the people who populate them, into better human beings. Plus, the girl is in love. Give her a break. A literal prince swept her off her feet. And Harry has always been our fave, us Black girls of a certain era. Go'n 'head with your ginger self!
What I AM surprised about is that the monarchy didn't even try to bend for this perfect chance to assimilate a working member of brownish skin into their political program. Which only tells me that, once again, for all the fights Black folks want to have about who is Black and who isn't, the only people who really decide whether you are White enough to be a colonizer are the colonizers themselves. And the Firm was so serious about not having her in it that they were willing to LOSE THEIR KIN to expel her from their midst. Man. White supremacy is a helluva drug.
As far as Meg Thee, my heart, my love, and my energy goes out also and as well to her, this Black girl who survived and is surviving not only the intimate proximity of the press (including the Black press) in every aspect of her life for a violence committed on her, but also experienced a physical assault that has had repercussions for her profession, her self-image, and her mental health. A whole song and album about anxiety and trauma. And while I empathize with both Megs, it is Meg Thee, Tina Snow, the Hot Girl of Hot Girls, who reminds me why I have always, from baby Jay until now, WANTED to be treated like a Black girl, have seen that as a space of power, rebellion, and defiance that, even for all of the dangers, threats, and traumas, is still a thing I wouldn’t trade for all of the royalty in the world.
Corrected (2022 December 22 | 17:12:44) Zora Neale Hurson’s hometown as Eatonville, FL.
WHEWWWWWWWWW! You did this.
This is a great piece. One thing, Zora Neale Hurston is from Eatonville not Eatonton.