Family drama wasn’t all that drove Prince Harry and Meghan Markle stateside.
In an unaired clip from Oprah Winfrey’s interview with the royal couple, Prince Harry said that institutional racism in England was a “large part” of why they left.
Harry revealed a conversation he had with a colleague at a fundraiser in which he warned
“One of the people at that dinner said to me, ‘Please don’t do this with the media. They will destroy your life.’ This person is friends with a lot of the editors. And I said, ‘So just to elaborate what do you mean by that?’ Obviously I knew,” Harry said in the clip, which aired Monday morning on “CBS This Morning.”
“He said, ‘You need to understand that the U.K. is very bigoted.’ And I stopped and I said, ‘The U.K.’s not bigoted — the U.K. press is bigoted, specifically the tabloids. Is that what you mean?’ And he goes, ‘No, the U.K.’s bigoted.’ And I said, ‘I completely disagree.’ But unfortunately if the source of information is inherently corrupt or racist or biased, then that filters out to the rest of society.”
Criticism about the coverage of Markle in British tabloids followed the couple, particularly in relation to similar stories about Prince William’s wife, Kate Middleton. In outlets like the Daily Mail, the Daily Mirror and the Sun, photos of both women cradling their respective baby bumps were split between a caring embrace and vanity. Kate and William’s private company was praised as family protection, while Harry and Meghan’s was painted as a money grab.
In another clip, Markle said that her concerns about the racism were brushed off by the royal family.
“The family would comfortably say, ‘We’ve all had to deal with things that are rude.’ Rude and racist are not the same,” she told Winfrey.
Winfrey’s Monday morning interview on CBS also revealed more details about Harry and Markle’s claims that members of the royal family expressed concerns that son Archie would be born with dark skin.
“(Prince Harry) did not want to share the identity with me but he wanted to make sure that I knew and, if I had an opportunity to share it, that it was not his grandmother nor his grandfather that was a part of those conversations,” Winfrey said, eliminating Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip.
