Meghan Markle Speaks About Her Experience With Racism in Resurfaced Video: I 'Want Things to Be Better'

My name's Meghan Markle and I'm here because I think it’s a really important campaign to be a part of. For me, I think it hits a really personal note. I'm bi-racial, most people can’t tell what I'm mixed with and so much of my life has felt like being a fly on the wall. And so some of the slurs that I've heard or the really offensive jokes, or the names, it's just hit me in a really strong way. And then, you know, a couple of years ago I heard someone call my mom the N word. So I think for me, beyond being personally affected by racism, just to see the landscape of what our country is like right now, and certainly the world, and to want things to be better.

Quite honestly, your race is part of what defines you. I think what shifts things is that the world really treats you based on how you look. Certain people don’t look at me and see me as a black woman or a biracial woman. They treat me differently, I think, than they would if they knew what I was mixed with, and I think that that is—I don’t know, it can be struggle as much as it can be a good thing depending on the people that you’re dealing with

Leaving LA [to work on Suits in Toronto] was sort of like leaving this bubble where I was used to everything, and had been exposed to everything except for a closed mindedness that I experienced when I traveled outside of where I was from. And I think that in doing that it just really opened my eyes to a mentality that still exists that I thought was backdated to the days of when my grandfather moved our family from Cleveland to LA, and they drove across the country and to stop and get food, whatever kind of place they were going to, and they had to go round the back to get food for the family. You know, I thought that was really isolated to those days that we were past, and sadly they're not.

I am really proud of my heritage on both sides, I’m really proud of where I’ve come from and where I’m going. But yeah, I hope that by the time I have children, that people are even more open-minded to how things are changing and that having a mixed world is what it’s all about. I mean certainly, it makes it a lot more beautiful and a lot more interesting.