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Meghan Markle’s mom regrets not having a ‘real conversation’ about race with her sooner

Doria Ragland reflects on the moment she told her daughter, ‘This is about race."

Doria Ragland knew what her daughter, the former Meghan Markle, would face when it came to racism in the pages of British tabloids long before the now-duchess had any idea.

In the second episode of Netflix’s new docuseries “Harry & Meghan,” the 66-year-old reflected on the moment she tried to prepare Meghan for what she believed was already happening once the couple’s royal romance became public knowledge. 

Meghan Markle and mom, Doria.
Meghan Markle and her mom, Doria Ragland.Netflix

One 2016 headline that flashed across the screen in the episode claimed, “Harry’s girl is (almost) straight outta Compton.” The story that followed questioned if Prince Harry would eventually drop by for tea to meet Meghan's mother in her “gang-scarred home."

“I said to her, I remember this very clearly, ‘This is about race,” Ragland explained. “Meg said, ‘Mommy, I don’t want to hear that.’ I said, ‘You may not want to hear it, but this is what’s coming down the pike.'”

While Meghan noted that the aforementioned headline was “factually incorrect,” that she “never lived in Compton,” she still didn’t realize what was happening at first. 

"At that time, I wasn’t thinking about how race played a part in any of this," the Duchess of Sussex noted in the same episode. "I genuinely didn’t think about it."

Meghan Markle and mom, Doria.
Young Meghan Markle with her mother.Netflix

It wasn't something she'd ever had to think about before.

“(It’s) very different to be a minority, but not be treated as a minority right off the bat," she said of her life before dating Prince Harry. "Obviously now people are very aware of my race because they made it such an issue when I went to the U.K. But before that most people didn’t treat me like a Black woman."

That's why she and her mother never had a serious talk about the subject when she was growing up. It's something Ragland now regrets.

"As a parent in hindsight, absolutely I would like to go back and and have that kind of real conversation about how the world sees you," she noted.

The first three episodes of the six-part docuseries, which was co-created by Harry and Meghan’s own production company, Archewell Productions, are available to stream on Netflix.

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