LONDON — For many in the British news media, the engagement of Prince Harry to Meghan Markle, a divorced biracial American, reflected how egalitarian Britain had become.
“A divorced, mixed-race, Hollywood actress who attended a Roman Catholic school is to marry the son of the next king,” began the lead editorial on Tuesday in The Daily Telegraph, a conservative newspaper. “Such a sentence could simply not have been written a generation ago.”
It was a sentiment — with some notable cautions — that echoed across political and ethnic boundaries.
Afua Hirsch, the author of “Brit(ish),” a coming book about racial identity in Britain, said that as a mixed-race child she had found it hard to reconcile her British-ness with “the family at the apex of society,” the racially homogeneous relatives of Prince Harry.
“That feels like that’s really changed,” Ms. Hirsch said on Tuesday. “There’s someone I can relate to now.”
But for Ms. Hirsch and other chroniclers of racial inequality in Britain, it is problematic to frame Ms. Markle’s engagement as too seminal a moment. The symbolism of Ms. Markle’s entry into a family that once shunned commoners, Catholics and divorced people — let alone nonwhites — does little to diminish structural racism across Britain, several commentators said.
“Markle is not Britain’s Obama moment and shouldn’t be covered as such,”
On Tuesday, it was announced that Ms. Markle would — in addition to joining the Anglican Church — apply for British citizenship after marrying Prince Harry on an unspecified date in May in St. George’s Chapel at Windsor Castle, the site of many royal weddings.
In response, a columnist for The Independent highlighted how Ms. Markle would find it far easier to gain citizenship through her husband, compared with the process other nonwhite immigrants face. Such immigrants are disproportionately more likely to fail the admission criteria than their white counterparts.
Across British society, the average black…
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