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On Jan. 9, 2020, an Instagram post and a new website from Royal Sussex announced that The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, aka Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, were stepping away from full-time royal duty to live a more private life. Dubbed by the British tabloid’s The Sun as “Megxit,” their seemingly self-imposed exile became non-stop fodder for days as revelations about the long-term planning of the scheme from the couple littered the pages of every online outlet. Watching the tsunami of supportive forces that galvanized around this couple and more specifically, this woman, and her provocative choice that for some hearkened back to Harriet Tubman helping the enslaved (in this case, Harry) get to freedom, was captivating. The population I am focusing on, black women, went to bat for Markle, celebrating her decision to part with the monarchy as a defiant act of black liberation politics. In their eyes, she had beaten them at their own game, the visceral connection to a body that looked like theirs generating a kind of affective high that only comes with the power of identificatory suture. But is that solidarity earned?

There’s a problem with the logics that black women publics use around Markle and it’s quite simply this: I don’t think she actively identifies as one of them. But black women identify with her. And from the moment Harry and Meghan announced their engagement, black women celebrated like it was their collective win. It didn’t matter that Meghan had no black friends or ever referenced herself as a black woman, preferring to be called a woman of color. We had a #blackprincess because of two factors: her visual body and her mother.

This identification not only is helpful because of the ways black women sutured identificatory pleasure with imagining being a black princess but it also helped them identify defensive strategies to protect her against racial targeting from the press. A defense squad of sorts, black women argued that the ways Markle was treated were gross and unequal to her white counterparts and a reminder of white supremacy and Empire. This provocation explores how black women in online spaces tied themselves to Markle’s continued struggle of “emancipation” through affective means where likely no real connection lie. The power of Markle’s imagery—what she signifies to black women and how she makes them feel ultimately supersedes any conversations about the complexity and complicated nature of racialization potentially flattening the equity they ultimately seek.

About the speaker:
Kristen Warner is an Associate Professor in the Department of Journalism and Creative Media at The University of Alabama. She is the author of The Cultural Politics of Colorblind TV Casting (Routledge, 2015). Kristen's research interests are centered at the juxtaposition of racial representation and its place within the film and television industries as it concerns issues of labor and employment. Warner’s work can be found in academic journals, a host of anthologies and online platforms like the Los Angeles Review of Books and Film Quarterly.

Free and open to all. Join us on Zoom.

This event is co-sponsored by the Black Visual Culture Obermann Working Group, the Department of Communication Studies, and the School of Journalism and Mass Communication.