An aide to former actress Meghan Markle and Prince Harry recently expressed some interesting claims about white people.
Genevieve Roth is the founder of Invisible Hand, a “female-led diverse team” based in New York advising Prince Harry and Markle’s Archewell Foundation. The former Hillary Clinton aide wrote an essay in 2020 in which she expressed that she’s “rife with internalized racism and unconscious bias.” Her writing on racism resurfaced after being hired by the couple and their tell-all interview with Oprah Winfrey.
Roth said that she only acknowledged her racism after marrying her Black husband, Jordan Keith. In an essay titled, “I Discovered Racism In My Own Marriage,” the entrepreneur revealed race is an issue in her marriage “because as a white woman of privilege, I have racist tendencies written in at a cellular level, and that can really gum up the works.”
To prove her point, Roth shared an instance when she casually mentioned to her husband that her license plates were nearing their expiration date, and he “lost his mind.” Roth said that at first she couldn’t figure out why her husband became so furious with her and asked him to stop yelling at her.
That’s when she revealed her husband said to her, “G, do you realize that if we get pulled over for these goddamn plates, I could get killed.” Roth admitted that she didn’t realize that because “when I get pulled over, the cops smile and ask me if I know my taillight is out.”
She continued, “Because I have that kind of body that police in America think they are supposed to protect, not to protect against. My marriage contains too many stories like this one. Times when I assumed that the way I experienced the world was the way the world was, full stop.” Roth wrote that she now knows “that the world treats me differently to my husband.”
In a later article for Good Housekeeping, Roth elaborated on her newfound sense of understanding when it comes to the topic of privilege and racism.
“It does not matter how many marches I have planned or how many progressive candidates I have campaigned for or how many times I have chanted Black Lives Matter in the streets: I am rife with internalized racism and unconscious bias,” Roth expressed. “And to all of the non-Black folks reading this, we need to get clear on something: So are you.”
Prince Harry echoed similar sentiments during a sit down with GQ magazine in October 2020, stating, “Unconscious bias … having the upbringing and the education that I had, I had no idea what it was. I had no idea it existed.” He added, “Sad as it is to say, it took me many, many years to realize it [existed], especially then living a day or a week in my wife’s shoes.”
