Meghan Markle is joined by Issa Rae for a raw discussion about the “angry Black woman” myth on her latest “Archetypes” podcast episode.
During the interview, “Awkward Black Girl” star Rae revealed how she’d taken a friend calling her “particular” as a compliment.
“To me, that means I have a sense of what I want,” she shared, as Markle agreed: “I’m particular. A. I think a high tide raises all ships — we’re all going to succeed, so let’s make sure it’s really great because it’s a shared success for everybody.
“But I also know that I will find myself cowering and tiptoeing into a room — I don’t know if you ever do that, the thing that I find the most embarrassing — when you’re saying a sentence and the intonation goes up like it’s a question. And you’re like, ‘Oh my God, stop!’ Stop whispering and tiptoeing around and say what it is you need. You’re allowed to set a boundary, you’re allowed to be clear. It does not make you demanding, it does not make you difficult. It makes you clear.”
Markle asked Rae, “Was there a point in your life, and maybe it still happens to you now, because of the archetypes, especially as a Black woman, do you feel that you’re allowed to be angry in certain moments?”
The “Insecure” star admitted, “Absolutely not. Because I can’t lose my cool, I can’t do that especially as a Black woman, but also just even as a public figure now. Because people are looking for ways to justify their perception of you. That doesn’t mean I don’t get angry.
“That might mean that I will vent my frustrations to someone that I trust, get it out of my system and then go in fix mode. And I think even personality wise, I’m always like, I don’t want to sit in my anger too long anyway because what does that do? I want to work on fixing something, but I want to be allowed to have that emotion because it’s a natural… like, it’s an emotion.”
Elsewhere in the interview, the Duchess of Sussex praised Rae for creating “nuanced, layered, multifaceted women” in her shows.
“I mean, I remember when I was auditioning, the idea of even Black roles, I remember those casting sheets where the description of the character, she always had to have an edge or an attitude,” Markle recalled.
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Towards the beginning of the episode, Markle also sat down with Ziwe Fumudoh.
The “Suits” star told Fumodoh how she’d “just had my genealogy done a couple years ago,” revealing that she was 43 percent Nigerian.
Markle went on, “I’m going to start to dig deeper into all this because anybody that I’ve told, especially Nigerian women, are like ‘What!'”
“This is huge for our community,” Fumudoh gushed. “No, honestly, you do look like a Nigerian, you look like my Aunt Uzo. So this is great.”
