For the HBO actress, the royal family wasn’t ready to welcome someone like Meghan Markle

Actress Denée Benton, who stars in HBO’s period series The Gilded Age, gave an interview in which she referred to Meghan Markle. She was asked how the royal family and Queen Meghan’s subjects were treated after the Duchess first returned to the UK for the Platinum Jubilee celebrations in June this year.

The interview was published in British magazine Tatler, and the actress, who is also black, cited Meghan’s status in the royal family as problematic.

“As the first and only black person to join the British royal family, she should really be prepared for a high degree of racism in the royal family. The system is not set up to support it. I think attributing the very devastating effects of colonialism as it relates to the monarchy,” the actress said.

Denée Benton said he further highlighted the level of institutional change required to fully accept and assimilate a black person into a historical structure based on traditions such as the monarchy, and that the burden of being the catalyst for that change could see the person become “living food”..

“This requires a lot of flexibility. Unless they are [a Coroa britânica] Willing to put in the effort, the person who is appointed to this position ends up suffering more than the changes they can make,” Benton continued.

“It’s going to take a lot longer than one person being present to start all this change. It really doesn’t work,” concluded the actress, noting the changing lives of Meghan and Harry, who are now no longer royals and live in the US with their two children.

What is a “gilded age”

The Gilded Age series premiered in January on HBO and HBO Max and is about New York in the early 1800s. Actress Denise Benton plays Peggy Scott, a black woman.

Her presence in the plot depicts how black women moved in society at the time. In the first season, Peggy pursued a career in writing and applied her craft to political journalism, a move that her father, Arthur Scott (John Douglas Thompson) deemed wasteful and somewhat detrimental to continuing his family’s legacy among elite blacks at the time.

Season 2 of The Gilded Age will delve deeper into the rich world of Brooklyn’s growing and wealthy black community and show viewers Peggy’s next steps after learning about her childhood life.