...I lost my name: Reaction to Oprah with Meghan and Harry
As I watched the interview with Meghan and Oprah I, selfishly perhaps, wished that my essay were out. Meghan spoke to the invisibility of being a woman of color in a predominately and palpably white space and so did I. Meghan talked about feeling unworthy and asking for help but being told that there was none to be offered. I so deeply understood that place. I found myself growing frustrated at Oprah’s shock and surprise and wanted, instead, for her to have a moment of joining. Surely Oprah knows the toil that racism and sexism and their intersection with class can take on a woman of color, a Black woman. Why was this so shocking? I wanted this space to be a holding space for Meghan. I wanted her to feel like she was not crazy at the end of this interview. I wanted her to feel affirmed, I hope she feels affirmed.
In my own experience, I was not in a royal family, I was in higher education. Feeling swallowed up and not wanting to live because I could not figure out how to be myself and survive in that environment. When Meghan referred to her own oppressors as “The Institution” I chuckled and winced. My own institutions had also failed me when they told me, at one point that they would support and protect me. Having a PhD and being part of the academy was supposed to mean something, that I had earned the right to fully inhabit my space and that my presence in the room was warranted and welcomed. That could not have been further from the truth. Instead much of my experience in higher education has been heartbreaking—full of distrust and disappointment. Harry spoke of Meghan being too good at her job, what was insinuated in what he did not say was that it was always in comparison to her white counterpart, Kate Middleton. She shined too brightly and she wasn’t supposed to, especially when it wasn’t as easy for the one who it was “supposed” to be easy for. I know that feeling. The feeling of being asked to prep someone else to teach a course I designed because THEY were the chosen ones to teach not me. And just like Oprah, when I described my experiences, people act shocked and surprised as if racism was a secret or if it really did get cauterized with achievement.
I wanted my essay to be out so that Meghan and anyone who watched Meghan’s interview and felt like I did, to know that they were not alone. You are not alone. You are of value. You are worthy. If it were not for your promise, there would not be such a grand calculated effort to suppress your greatness. Please never give up on yourself. Understand and know that the rooms we sometimes have asked to inhabit were not built with you in mind, stand firm anyway. Stand firm knowing you come with the strength of your ancestors and greatness is your birthright. This the life I had spoken into me. Sweet reminders from my community of who I am and whose I am, the fertile ground from which I have blossomed.
My favorite part of the interview was when Oprah insinuated to Harry that Meghan had saved him from being trapped. Trapped in a bubble of colonialism, imperialism, racism, sexism, xenophobia, classism, patriarchy, and most of all shame fueled silence. Meghan who previously referred to losing her name and her desire to live became the savior simply by remembering who she was and asserting with all her energy and action, ENOUGH. She and her husband left “the institution” and chose, instead, their freedom. Which is exactly the way my own story went.
