Opinion | Don’t Harry and Meghan Know Better?

In that 2021 prime-time special, they both detailed the blatant racism, double standards and block indifference, even cruelty, of the royal family. As Meghan, in particular, shared her story, you couldn’t help but wonder how she withstood it all. Theirs was a compelling performance, a closing argument in the matter of what precipitated such a drastic move toward respite and reinvention.

In 2023, Harry published “Spare,” a lengthy memoir about growing up as the boy who always knew he would never be king. The prose was utilitarian and occasionally funny. Early in the memoir, he has a line about William’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own,” that makes me laugh every time I think of it. But mostly, Harry’s was a hollow story of knowing your place in life and being unduly constrained by it.

In their new fairy tale, the Sus***es began, with varying degrees of success, business endeavors and media partnerships. They tried to demonstrate that they could not only survive but thrive without the support of the royal family. Before marriage, Meghan made her own way in the world. She did it once, and she could do it again. Harry, on the other hand, had never known a civilian life in which he truly had to prove himself, in which he wasn’t lavishly celebrated by birthright.

Little came of Harry’s attempts at media work. Most of the podcast ideas he proposed, for instance, were silly at best, and nothing happened with his one good idea, a series about fatherhood. Harry and Meghan must have hoped that distance and time would help him find his footing, but the most successful endeavors he had stateside were all connected to the very thing he was trying to escape: his royal lineage. He had to learn that when people aren’t by custom expected to like or pretend to like you, you have to bring something substantive to the table and when you don’t, the opportunities disappear. Making of this old world a new world remained elusive.

There was also the challenge of public opinion, which was mixed. In some corners, Harry and Meghan were lauded for fighting for gilded independence (because Harry holds an amount of privilege from which he can never truly escape). Others said they were abandoning the royal family, being selfish, especially when the palace announced more than two years ago that Charles had cancer. A lot of people blamed Meghan for being too much of a diva, too difficult to work with, too American and, of course, too Black.