Meghan Markle And Issa Rae Unpack The 'Angry Black Woman' Trope On Her Latest Podcast
Meghan Markle recently unpacked the “angry Black woman” trope in her latest podcast episode Archetypes with Insecure star Issa Rae.
On October 25, Markle and Rae, along with Ziwe, shared their experiences regarding their experiences about being viewed as “particular,” or aggressive. The Rap Sh*t creator opined that folks had a problem with Black women being direct.
Markle concurred, expounding on why people conflate directness with demanding, “The thing that I find the most embarrassing [is] when you’re saying a sentence, and the intonation goes up like it’s a question. And you’re like, ‘Oh my God, stop!’ Stop whispering and tiptoeing around and just say what it is you need. You’re allowed to set a boundary. You’re allowed to be clear. It does not make you demanding. It does not make you difficult. It makes you clear.”
Rae shared her experiences and expressed that she didn’t feel it was necessary to “lose her cool.”
“Absolutely not. Because I can’t lose my cool, I can’t do that, especially as a black woman, but also just even as a public figure now. Because people are looking for ways to justify their perception of you.”
Rae continued, “That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry. That might mean that I will vent my frustrations to someone that I trust, get it out of my system and then go in fix mode. And I think even personality-wise, I’m always like, I don’t want to sit in my anger too long anyway because what does that do? I want to work on fixing something, but I want to be allowed to have that emotion because it’s a natural … like, it’s an emotion.”
Markle also opened up about her racial identity and how she hadn’t always lived a full Black experience until she married Prince Harry.
“If there’s any time in my life that it’s been more focused on my race, it’s only when I started dating my husband,” she told Grammy Award-winning singer Mariah Carey during a recording of her pod. “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.”
