The Duchess of Sussex has revealed that her life only became more focused on her race after she started dating Prince Harry.
In the latest episode of Meghan’s Archetypes podcast, entitled The Duality Of Diva With Mariah Carey, the former actress opened up about her experiences as a mixed race woman with the pop icon.
In a discussion with the “We Belong Together” singer, the Duchess said: “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.
“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.”
Released on Spotify, the second podcast episode aimed to look at the “complexities surrounding the ‘diva'” and the negative connotations associated with the word.
The pair also spoke about Carey’s childhood and how she felt she “didn’t fit in” and was teased by a boy at school.
Born in Huntington, New York, the award-winning artist said: “I didn’t fit in, it would be more of the black area of town, or then you could be where my mom chose to live, where there were more white neighbourhoods and I didn’t fit in anywhere at all.”
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She described how she was picked on by a boy at school for having only three shirts and wearing them on rotation, adding: “In a world where you’re the mixed kid of a full-on white neighbourhood, that’s what you get.”
Mariah ‘got me thinking even more deeply about my own complicated feelings’
After the conversation, Meghan reflected on how Carey has impacted how she feels about being labelled a diva.
Speaking in a voiceover, she said: “Mariah’s own relationship with the diva, the nuances she sees, the history, both personal and cultural that she carries, she’s got me thinking even more deeply about my own complicated feelings towards the label.”
In the first episode of the podcast, entitled The Misconception of Ambition with Serena Williams, Meghan recalled a story of how Archie narrowly escaped a fire in his bedroom when he was supposed to be sleeping during the Sussexes’ first royal tour in South Africa.
Archie’s then-nanny, named only as Lauren, had taken the four-month-old with her downstairs instead while she went to get a snack.
Meghan said: “In that amount of time that she went downstairs, the heater in the nursery caught on fire. There was no smoke detector. Someone happened to just smell smoke down the hallway, went in, fire extinguished. He was supposed to be sleeping in there.”
She said that after the fire, the couple were made to carry on with official engagements.
Duchess ‘still healing’ since stepping back from royal duties
On Monday, in an interview with the New York Magazine’s The Cut, Meghan said she has “really made an active effort to forgive” both her in-laws and members of her own family, and that since she stepped back from royal duties she “hasn’t had to sign anything that restricts me from talking”, but is “still healing” from the ordeal.
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She also claimed that in private, the Duke of Sussex has referred to “losing my dad in this process”, suggesting he no longer has a relationship with Prince Charles.
Describing the protocol of having to share pictures of their son Archie when he was a newborn with the media, she said: “Why would I give the very people that are calling my children the N-word a photo of my child before I can share it with the people that love my child?”
Harry and Meghan are set to visit the UK in September, but there have been reports that the Sussexes will not be able to visit the Queen at Balmoral due to security issues.
