Prince Harry and Meghan Markle considered publicly sharing the name of the person who made racist comments about Archie’s skin colour, an unauthorised biography of the couple has claimed.
In Finding Freedom, royal family commentators Omid Scobie and Carolyn Durand recall the couple’s controversial interview with Oprah Winfrey in March, during which Meghan revealed there were concerns amongst the royal family about how dark Archie’s skin might be when he was born.
Meghan did not tell Winfrey whether the concerns were raised by one person or several people, or name the person who made the comment.
An anonymous source told Scobie and Durand “that the couple had considered sharing this detail” but they decided not to.
During the interview with Winfrey, Meghan said the comments were relayed to her from conversations Harry had with his family.
“In those months when I was pregnant...we have in tandem the conversation of ‘He won’t be given security. He’s not going to be given a title,’ and also concerns and conversations about how dark his skin might be when he’s born,” she said.
When asked who made the comments, Meghan said she would not reveal their identity because it would be “very damaging to them”.
Later in the interview, Winfrey also questioned Harry on the comments. “That conversation I am never going to share ... but at the time it was awkward, I was in shock,” Harry told her.
Winfrey later told CBS This Morning that the comments did not come from the Queen or Prince Philip.
“[Harry] did not share the identity with me but he wanted to make sure I knew, and if I had an opportunity to share it, that it was not his grandmother or grandfather that were part of those conversations,” Winfrey said.
Days after the interview aired in the UK on 8 March, Prince William was asked if “the royal family is a racist family” while visiting a school in east London.
“We’re very much not a racist family,” he replied. Also in the biography, the authors write that according to sources, William “was understood to be ‘furious’ that private family matters were being discussed in the public domain”.
Harry and Meghan’s legal team have said that Scobie and Durand do not speak for the couple and that the couple “did not collaborate with the authors on the book, nor were they interviewed for it”.
