It’s All About the Poise: Meghan Markle, Doria Ragland, and Black Motherhood(s)

Abstract

This article considers the celebrity persona of Doria Ragland, the mother of Meghan Markle, the Duchess of Sussex. In the run-up to Markle’s marriage to Prince Harry in May 2018, there was significant press speculation about the roles Markle’s family might play in the wedding ceremony. At the event, the only member of Markle’s family who was present was Ragland. She thus embodies a figure, the Black single mother, who is stigmatized in white popular culture and politics and in discourses of Black respectability. This article performs a close reading of three key images of Ragland that have circulated widely. These are a photograph of her from her daughter’s wedding, an Instagram photo of her with her grandson, and an photo of her meeting survivors of the fire at Grenfell Tower. These images work to offer an image of Ragland as dignified, calm, and poised. While this may seem to celebrate a progressive vision of Black single motherhood, emphasis on her poise betrays how Ragland is assessed through the extent of her rigid conformity to highly racialized and gendered norms.

Keywords:

• Ragland
• Markle
• motherhood
• royal family

Notes

1 According to that repository of popular wisdom, Wikipedia, Ragland and Markle divorced in either 1987 or 1988.

2 As media scholar Mary Beltrán explains, the term postracial has multiple and contradictory definitions and implications. As deployed by some conservative commentators, the concept implies the end of all racial disparities and the achievement of a society in which the privileges of whiteness have been obtained by all; as defined by Paul Gilroy, postracial is a future-facing term in which racialized hierarchies and the hegemony of whiteness are upended, with radical and subversive implications for equality and social power. In considering the royal family potentially “postracial” through the incorporation of Markle, and by extension Ragland, the former definition is largely how the concept is being implicitly understood in social media and the popular press, though elements of the latter idea may also be present.

3 See in particular Crunktastic.

4 Thomas Markle infamously staged paparazzi-style photos of himself getting measured for a wedding suit and reading a book about Britain that were published in The Mail on Sunday in May 2018, just prior to his daughter’s marriage to Prince Harry. It was subsequently reported that Markle’s half-sister Samantha Markle had suggested he stage the photographs. Samantha Markle also participated in a TV documentary, screened on Channel 5 on March 1, 2019, and titled Meghan and the Markles: A Family at War.

5 Grenfell Tower was a twenty-four-story tower block that formed part of the Lancaster West Estate in North Kensington, West London. On June 14, 2017, a fire broke out and quickly spread due to unsafe external cladding. Seventy-two people died, making it the worst residential fire in the United Kingdom since World War II.