Meghan Markle pulls apart ‘angry Black woman’ trope in latest podcast-Josh Milton-Entertainment – Metro

Meghan Markle explained how the racist stereotype has impacted her (Picture: Getty)

Meghan Markle pulled apart the ‘angry Black woman’ trope in today’s episode of her podcast, Archetypes.

The Duchess of Sussex, whose weekly Spotify podcast explores the ways women are stereotyped, said there’s a difference between being ‘difficult’ and ‘clear’.

Speaking with actor Issa Rae and talk show host Ziwe Fumudoh, they discussed how Black women are made to feel they need ‘allowed’ to be angry.

Meghan said: ‘I remember when I was auditioning, the idea of even Black roles, and I remember those casting sheets where the description of the character — she always had to have an edge or an attitude.’

‘This idea that a Black woman must be angry when we all know sometimes things make you feel angry or sad or hurt or upset and that’s not a gender or racially specific feeling,’ she said earlier in the episode.

‘This trope of the angry Black woman, it persists, and… it was being reinforced constantly in ways we hadn’t even realised.’

Meghan Markle, who starred in Suits, said Black roles were always described as having ‘attitude’ (Picture: USA Network/Netflix/Kobal/REX/Shutterstock)

Rae described how her friend called her ‘particular’ as a compliment, seeing it as a comment on how she has a ‘sense of what I am’.

‘I’m particular,’ added Meghan.

‘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.’

Meghan also asked Rae whether, as a Black woman, she feels ‘allowed’ to be angry.

‘Absolutely not,’ she said, ‘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.’

Rae said she used her hit HBO show Insecure to challenge anti-Black stereotypes by doing some simple yet, unfortunately, ground-breaking.

And that was to show Black women as people with a breadth of emotions.

The Duchess described herself as ‘particular’ (Picture: Charles McQuillan/Getty Images)

‘One of the things that Prentice, who was our showrunner, expressed, just like, I want to be able to have scenes where Black people are just washing their hands,’ she told Meghan.

‘It’s like, white shows just get entire scenes dedicated to people just walking upstairs pensively, and then we don’t really get that.

‘There always has to be a message. And so, for us, it was just about, like, living day to day.

‘And even if we did have, you know, these moments that were considered microaggressions or racist that we didn’t dedicate time to like, “oh this is a racist moment,’ because in real life you don’t get those opportunities”.’

Tart-tongued with a hand on her hip, television and cinema has long relied on the ‘angry Black woman’ trope that finds its roots in chattel slavery.

Markle said that microaggressions and racial stereotypes aren’t solved like an ‘after-school special’ like they are in some TV shows.

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Black women, Rae said, have to live with such pain each day.

‘How is that going to affect the way that I talk to my partner when I get home?’ she said.

‘How is that going to affect my mindset when I’m having this conversation with my friend?

‘How does it dictate the way I move the next day? As opposed to, ‘Racism, oh no!’ You know, because that’s just how we live.’

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