PRINCE HARRY IS NOW FATHER TO A SON (CONGRATS)

PRINCE HARRY IS NOW FATHER TO A SON:

CONGRATS TO HIS ROYAL HIGHNESS & WIFE MEGHAN, DUCHESS OF SUSSEX.

GOD BLESS THEM ALL.


Post Sources: CBS News, NY Times, Youtube


*** Prince Harry and Meghan Markle are officially parents to a baby boy.

The Duchess of Sussex gave birth to her first child early on Monday morning UK time, after months of speculation about her exact due date.

“Her Royal Highness The Duchess of Sussex was safely delivered of a son at 0526hrs (2.26pm Monday AEST),” Buckingham Palace said in a statement. “The baby weighs 7lbs 3oz (3.26kg).

DORIA RAGLAND DEBUNKS MYTHS ABOUT BLACK SINGLE MOTHERS

DORIA RAGLAND DEBUNKS MYTHS ABOUT BLACK SINGLE MOTHERS:

DORIA DID A GREAT JOB REARING MEGHAN AND SHE EDUCATED HERSELF ALONG THE WAY.

BLACK IS NO LONGER AN UGLY HUE.

I RESPECT DORIA AS A BEAUTIFUL, INTELLIGENT WOMAN AND SO DOES PRINCE HARRY.

DORIA WASN'T TRYING TO CREATE CHAOS FOR THE ROYAL FAMILY OR SEEK FAME AND THAT'S WHY SHE WAS INVITED.

BEST WISHES TO DORIA.


Post Sources: New Yorker, People, Nicki Swift, Royal Family Channel, Youtube


****** The Profound Presence of Doria Ragland


The day of the royal wedding, we could not keep our eyes off her. What was she thinking, as she sat in the pews of the five-hundred-year-old chapel, enveloped in history and irony? I mean the mother of the bride, Doria Ragland. A millennium of world-shifting encounters—of violence and of romance and of acts in between—produced this scene: the sixty-one-year-old Ragland, an American who teaches yoga and does social work in Culver City, California, sitting in the opposite and equivalent seat to Queen Elizabeth II. They’d agreed on green, the color of beginnings—Ragland in churchy, pastel Oscar de la Renta, the Queen in electric-lime Stewart Parvin. One is a descendant of the enslaved, a child of the Great Migration and Jim Crow and seventies New Age spirituality; the other, the heir to and keeper of empire. Blood had long ago decided what life would be like for both.

But love barges in and finds a way. Love brings together Prince Harry and Meghan Markle, whose train of identifiers—biracial, actress, Angeleno, divorcée, feminist, former life-style blogger—complete the Mad Libs of the new American vogue. Love brings together their families: the House of Windsor and a one-woman house. Genuine attraction seemed to pulse between them, as Harry, biting his lip, giddily whispered to his bride, “You look amazing.” Markle’s doe eyes glinted. Nearby, Ragland radiated with what looked like maternal pride. Certainly it was more complex than just that.

Ragland isn’t an actress like her daughter, but she said many things with her face. Photographs of her and Markle pressed close to one another in the Rolls-Royce on the way to the chapel show the mother trying on a regent’s wave, smiling warmly but tentatively. Inside, she executed her duties with grace. Her locs had been swept beneath her pillbox hat; the shine of her tiny nose ring gleamed like the shine in her eyes. There was not much emoting in the crowd of royal fascinators, although many screwed their faces as Bishop Michael Bruce Curry, the first black head of the Episcopal Church, thundered in his sermon about the possibility of a “new world.” But one could perceive Ragland softly reeling beneath her composure. Her lips trembled as her daughter walked down the aisle. She cried gently. When Curry spoke about the example of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the power of radical, social love, she nodded unreservedly; when the East London choir roused the room with Ben E. King’s “Stand By Me,” she swayed. Sometimes the cameras would catch Ragland as if she were in a trance, lost in some intimate thought.

What we know of the relationship between mother and daughter has an “us against the world” feel to it. After her parents divorced, when she was six, Markle spent weekdays with her mother. Ragland doted on her only child, calling her “Flower.” When Markle became wealthy, she paid for her mother to attend graduate school; in a Mother’s Day post on her blog, she swooned with reverence over Ragland’s resilience. There’s no “Imitation of Life” drama here, in which the mixed-race daughter shuns her darker-skinned mother. Markle clearly delights in what she euphemizes as her mother’s “free spirit.” But they are different women. Markle makes it a point to call herself biracial. She vaguely invokes the “wounds” of American history, but is careful not to frame herself as a race hero. The skin of the mother is honey brown, but the daughter has been cast as ethnically ambiguous. In essays, Markle recalls that, as a child, strangers in the Valley mistook her mother for her nanny. In front of billions, Markle entered one of the oldest halls of whiteness, with the flowers of former colonies sewn onto her veil, and blended in. Ragland stood out.

It is true that Markle and her groom beautifully threaded black rituals throughout the ceremony. But claims about the wedding’s “wokeness” are a little jarring. This was a royal marriage set against the backdrop of the government threatening to deport Britons of the Windrush generation. Was that melancholy in Ragland’s eyes? A worry about whether her daughter would be truly accepted in the family, and what she may have to do to usher in that acceptance? Did she recall the Christmas luncheon that Markle attended in December, at which Princess Michael of Kent wore a blackamoor brooch clipped to her jacket? Markle had longtime friends in her party, but Ragland was the sole representative of her family. Ragland’s mother, Jeannette, who reportedly watched Markle as a child while Doria worked, died in 2000. Through her presence, Ragland implied a lineage of black women—and represented the fraught lineage of a nation.

It should not be lost on anyone that, despite the pitiful shenanigans of her ex-husband, Thomas Markle, and the gossiping of her ex-step-children, Ragland flew to Heathrow to do what black women do: straighten the mess up. One vision of the black mother depends on this kind of self-effacing altruism. The public has fallen for Ragland. On Twitter, people speculate that Lady Diana Spencer, whose legend of social rebellion is especially idolized by black women, would have adored her. At an afternoon tea on Friday, Ragland “charmed” the Queen, and she has quit her job at the mental-health clinic to avoid the paparazzi. The big interview will likely come via Oprah, who, swaggering into the castle on Saturday in pink, called attention to her own supremacy. But how Ragland will participate in the cult of her daughter’s marriage is yet to be seen. There is new pressure on the Duke and Duchess of Sussex—who take their titles after the first and only Duke of Sussex, who supported abolition—to liven up the monarchy’s social reputation. The hunger for a cordial kind of racial harmonizing is strong. I know Markle feels that burden, and I know that Ragland does, too.

MEGHAN MARKLE'S WEDDING TO HARRY BRIDGES GAP BETWEEN BLACK WOMEN & ANTIQUATED RACISM (CONGRATS)

MEGHAN MARKLE'S WEDDING TO ROYAL SON BRIDGES GAP BETWEEN BLACK WOMEN & ANTIQUATED RACISM:

CONGRATULATIONS TO THE ROYAL COUPLE.

BLACK IS NO LONGER AN UGLY HUE.

(SORRY I'M SO LATE TO POST NEWS ABOUT PRINCE HARRY'S WEDDING TO MEGHAN MARKLE.)


Post Sources: The Root, People, BBC News, CNN, Sky News, Youtube


****** Why Meghan Markle Matters (Whether We Like It or Not)


Representation matters. We’ve both heard and said it repeatedly: our visibility and presence—in every arena—is vital to our perception of ourselves and what spaces we believe we deserve to occupy, both in the world and in the scope of the human imagination.

And yet, as The Root covered the marriage of Meghan Markle into the British monarchy, repeatedly we heard some variation of any or all of the following questions:

“Why are you reporting on this? Why should we care? What does this mean for us?”

Let’s get one thing out of the way up front: we’re a black news site (don’t @ me about that fact while you’re using Al Gore’s internet; I know who I work with and to whom I report), so the question of why we’d cover the entry of a biracial American actress into the British royal family is basically asking us why we’re doing our jobs properly. (Which is a dumb question, so cut it out.)

But aside from that, contrary to Al Sharpton’s surprisingly naive opinion, no one here is under the illusion that the new Duchess of Sussex is going to change the course of white supremacy—or the long and brutal history of imperialism and colonialism that Britain has both perpetuated and passed down to its younger brother, America. If the election of the first black biracial American president only served to stoke the ire of the irrationally entitled, an interracial marriage into the British monarchy is probably not going to spontaneously inspire world peace (or solve racism, hunger or inequality), amirite?

Frankly, that’s not even a fair expectation to place upon Markle’s newly crowned head, as ending any ism remains the job of those who perpetuate it. And, as the royal family is currently more of a PR-driving figurehead than absolute British rule, it’d be a losing battle, anyway.

But with that in mind, it could be argued that the question of Meghan Markle’s relevance is only, well, a relevant question if one is predominantly concerned with the white gaze—and the white supremacy so often adjacent to it.

Fun fact: When I was a little girl, my parents refused to buy me any dolls that weren’t black because they didn’t want me to aspire to a beauty standard that didn’t include me (forget the skinny and perpetually in heels part). Accordingly, my Barbie Christie collection (which didn’t really resemble me, either, tbh) was pitifully small, which was fairly devastating to an already fashion-obsessed child.

It would take Mattel 40 years to introduce a full range of dolls that could even hope to begin to reflect the range of children (and doll enthusiasts) who want to be part of the Barbie universe. I now have a young niece who’s only just beginning to take an interest in dolls; despite my own childhood disappointment, should I not consider it progress that if and when she asks for a Barbie, I can now get her one that has a massive mane of naturally textured hair, just like her?

Meghan Markle is a living, breathing human being—a fact many seem to forget when discussing her—and while very light-complected and straight-haired, is the first black woman to be openly acknowledged by the British royal family (despite not being the first to potentially enter the royal bloodline; she’s not even the only black princess in Europe). Is that not a space we are (finally) entitled to be represented in, too?

Yesterday, those of us who were interested enough to watch (or were professionally obligated to) were given indisputable evidence that Meghan Markle knows exactly who she is, and what she represents—and clearly wanted the world to know it, too. She may have married a wealthy white man, but the question of her own identity was well-answered; not that she hasn’t answered it before, years before her engagement was announced:

Growing up in a homogeneous community in Pennsylvania, the concept of marrying an African-American woman was not on the cards for my dad. But he saw beyond what was put in front of him in that small-sized (and, perhaps, small-minded) town. ... He wanted me to find my own truth.

Markle’s truth was evident in the choice of a black priest to deliver an impassioned homily at her wedding. It was evident in the gospel choir that followed. It was evident in her musical selections. And most profoundly, there was tangible evidence of Markle’s heritage in her mother, Doria Ragland, to whom Markle once wrote a deeply loving tribute on her now-defunct blog, The Tig.

From the looks of it, Markle has been clear about her identity for quite some time. And whether or not a royal wedding—or the idea of “royalty” at all—personally resonates with you, to question whether or not she “matters” is, in some ways, to question whether or not you do.

Because bottom line: Representation does matter. While I don’t personally aspire to be a princess (or know anyone who does, though I’m sure they’re out there), if only mere months ago we were collectively overjoyed to meet the fictional black princess of a country that only exists onscreen, does it really make sense to be dismissive of a real one in one of the most powerful countries in the world?

It doesn’t unless you’re really dismissive of whom she chose to marry. And that’s your prerogative; just call a thing a thing, rather than dismissing the entire affair. (I personally just shrug at people marrying folks that look like their one of their parents, but that’s me.)

As to the question of what impact Markle’s presence and story will or should have, that was perhaps best answered by British writer and broadcaster Afua Hirsch, who has been very open about her own experiences growing up biracial in Britain, and was one of many commentators who spoke to BBC America just prior to Saturday’s nuptials:

I think the challenge for the royal family is how to be a family that represents very old-fashioned values—of intergenerational inherited privilege—in a society that’s about equality of opportunity and multiculturalism. And I think that Meghan Markle is certainly someone who represents the latter; she has become successful through her own talent and hard work, she’s used her celebrity to champion causes that she’s passionate about, and also, as a woman of mixed heritage, she hasn’t shied away from speaking about that; she’s owned it.

And for me, as a black British woman of mixed heritage myself, I think there’s been a lot of pressure in my lifetime in this country—if you’re entering spaces that have previously been very white—to downplay your identity. And I think she represents a real cultural change in her willingness not to minimize it, but to speak about it. And for me, that sends a powerful signal, that you can own your identity and it’s not a taboo; it’s not something to shy away from. And that also, there is nothing essentially ‘white’ about Britishness.

You know, for a lot of people, the royal family represents a sense of British identity, and until now, that has been an identity very much linked to whiteness in many people’s perceptions. So, I think the visual and symbolic change that Meghan’s entry into that family represents is actually quite profound.

HRH Prince Harry In NYC.....What A Likable Bloke He Is!...Thanks Diana

(MSNBC reports on HRH Prince Harry's first official visit to the U.S., this weekend in NYC. I wonder if he bumped into America's Royalty, the Obamas.)

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Sources: MSNBC, Day Life, Reuters, Google Maps