How Meghan Markle dealt with painful ‘White Girls Only’ club during childhood

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The same biographer who told Princess Diana‘s life story is giving future royal Meghan Markle the same treatment in a new book that offers up more details of her pre-Prince Harry life.

In Meghan: A Hollywood Princess, biographer Andrew Morton talks about the distressing appearance of a “white girls only” clique when Markle was a kid. According to Morton, a group of girls asked Markle if she wanted to join the exclusionary club. Markle has a Black mother and a white father.

Excerpt from People Magazine:

“On one occasion the so-called ‘mean girls’ announced they were starting a ‘White Girls Only’ club and wanted Meghan to join. ‘Are you kidding me?’ said Meghan to the gaggle of her fellow pupils, dismissing them in a sentence. They went very quiet after that.”

Markle (who by the way will NOT become Princess Meghan after her Spring nuptials to Prince Harry) has spoken out before about her racial identity and what she has experienced as a child and an adult.

–After deplorable Roseanne Barr fires shots at Black-ish our writer is ready to throw hands—

She penned an essay for Elle recalling an incident from seventh grade.

“There was a mandatory census I had to complete in my English class – you had to check one of the boxes to indicate your ethnicity: white, black, Hispanic or Asian. There I was (my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed race) looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up, but not knowing what to do. You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other – and one half of myself over the other. My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian. ‘Because that’s how you look, Meghan,’ she said. I put down my pen. Not as an act of defiance, but rather a symptom of my confusion. I couldn’t bring myself to do that.”

Racism and the royal couple

Markle identifies as biracial. Her encounters with themes of race did not stop at adolescence. One of Prince Harry’s royal relatives recently arrived to a family gathering Markle attended wearing a “blackamoor” brooch depicting a Black person wearing a crown. Blackamoor is a kind of jewelry that originated in Venice in the 16th century. This style of It often portrays exotic or romanticized versions of Africans, particularly enslaved people

Markle is no stranger to racist responses to her presence in the royal family. She’s been getting heat ever since she and Prince Harry started dating.

–Where the hell are all the Black Panther toys?–

“It’s disheartening,” Meghan told the BBC previously about the racism she has seen since she and Harry officially announced their relationship.

“You know it’s a shame that that is the climate in this world to focus that much on that or that that would be discriminatory in that sense, but I think…at the end of the day I’m really just proud of who I am and where I come from, and we have never put any focus on that. We’ve just focused on who we are as a couple.”