Over the past week there’s been endless coverage of Harry & Meghan, Netflix’s most-viewed documentary premiere, the show that’s offered the pair a chance to win the all-out narrative war that has emerged between them and the palace.
Who will emerge victorious? It depends where you’re watching. In the UK, Meghan is pilloried as a traitor – especially by rightwing columnists like Jeremy Clarkson and Piers Morgan – but in the US her story plays as an emotional one and commentators cannot tell it without analyzing the palace’s treatment of her from a racial lens. Some Black American fans of the duchess see parallels in her story to their own lives. Writing for the New York Times, the activist and scholar Salamishah Tillet said Meghan’s exasperated remark that she’d “tried so hard” to fit into the royal mold rang true as “a frustratingly familiar refrain” for women of color.
