Christelle Collet is a black woman who met her white husband on a Perth beach. She was triggered by the Prince Harry and Meghan Markle interview with Oprah Winfrey.
“The moment when Meghan said [an unnamed member of the royal family] was concerned of the skin colour of her child when she was pregnant, I believed her, because this exact thing happened to me,” she says.
“This whole obsession about the phenotype of the child and expecting [a child to be] lesser than [if they have] very Afrocentric features — that I have myself — was not only hurtful to me, but it was also racist because racism is all about the categorisation of human beings based on those traits.”
Ms Collet is a decolonisation academic at the Centre for Research on Slavery and Indenture in Mauritius and says black people marrying into white families should expect to experience some level of racism — it isn’t a matter of if, but how to deal with it.
She’s rubbished Prince William’s assertion that “[the royal family is] very much not a racist family”.
“It’s obvious that he doesn’t understand the definition of racism. It seems that he does not know the history of his family and the British Empire that was founded on colonialism and slavery.
“And the funny thing is, I find it very convenient that he had a black woman walking next to him [when he said it].”
