All the Black Guests at the Royal Wedding & The Significance of Rev Curry

Where to even begin?! As of today, not only is there an American in the British Royal Family, there is an American that identifies as biracial, having an African-American mother and white father. With Blacks in Britain having very little representation in politics, Meghan Markle (the now Duchess of Sussex), represents a shake up in the highest echelons of British society. And the first mark of that shake up was the presence of Black people at her wedding in a glorious way!

Of course, with Markle being an actress and Harry being a prince, there were a number of celebrity guests, highlighted below. But more remarkable was the presence of Reverend Michael Curry who gave a lively 13-minute sermon, quoting Martin Luther King, Jr., as was the Kingdom Choir who sang Ben E. King’s famous song Stand by Me and closed the ceremony with the song This Little Light of Mine, a song often performed during Civil Rights protests in the 1960s in America. These moments in Markle’s wedding, which draw from a critical part of America’s history, made the biggest statement of all, a statement way bigger than what she wore. They signaled her unabashed recognition of her own Black American culture. She let the millions of people who watched the wedding know that these things are a part of who she is. Meghan is both Black and white, not one or the other, as she indicated in her essay for ELLE, and her race has already and will likely continue to be a topic of a discussion in a world that isn’t post-racial (as much as some people will like to think so). This was probably one of the moments, since entering the limelight at this level, that Markle took control of this part of her narrative.

When people seem to have a hard time wrapping their heads around the complexity of human beings, of individuals and the notion that identity isn’t some sort of singular concept that can be easily categorized, Markle and this particular Royal wedding showed that people and culture are never just one thing; they’re moldings of several things. All the history, all the events, all the cultures, all the people that come together in love.