Revealing Britain?s Systemic Racism: The Case of Meghan Markle and the Royal Family

Revealing Britain’s Systemic Racism applies an existing scholarly paradigm (systemic racism and the white racial frame) to assess the implications of Markle’s entry and place in the British royal family, including an analysis that bears on visual and material culture. The white racial frame, as it manifests in the UK, represents an important lens through which to map and examine contemporary racism and related inequities. By questioning the long-held, but largely anecdotal, beliefs about racial progressiveness in the UK, the authors provide an original counter-narrative about how Markle’s experiences as a biracial member of the royal family can help illumine contemporary forms of racism in Britain. Revealing Britain’s Systemic Racism identifies and documents the plethora of ways systemic racism continues to shape ecological spaces in the UK. Kimberley Ducey and Joe R. Feagin challenge romanticized notions of racial inclusivity by applying Feagin’s long-established work, aiming to make a unique and significant contribution to literature in sociology and in various other disciplines.

Kimberley Ducey, PhD, is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Winnipeg in Manitoba, Canada. She is a public sociologist, whose work has appeared in such journals as Canadian Ethnic Studies, Critical Criminology, and Genocide Studies and Prevention. Her work also appears in Animal Oppression, the Routledge Handbook of Public Criminologies, The Cambridge Handbook of Sociology, the Handbook of the Sociology of Racial and Ethnic Relations, the Routledge International Handbook of Public Sociology, and Educating for Critical Consciousness. Her other books with Joe R. Feagin include Racist America (4th edn, Routledge, 2019), Elite White Men Ruling (Routledge, 2017), and Liberation Sociology (also with Hernán Vera; 3rd edn, 2014). Dr Ducey has edited two books, George Yancy: A Critical Reader (2021, with Clevis Headley and Joe R. Feagin) and Systemic Racism Theory: Making Liberty, Justice, and Democracy Real (2017, with Ruth Thompson-Miller).

Joe R. Feagin, PhD, is Distinguished Professor and Ella C. McFadden Professor in Sociology at Texas A&M University. He has done much internationally recognized research on US racism, sexism, and political economy issues. He has written or co-written 74 scholarly books and 200-plus scholarly articles in his social science areas. His books include Systemic Racism (Routledge, 2006), White Party, White Government (Routledge, 2012), Latinos Facing Racism (Routledge, 2014, with Jose A. Cobas), How Blacks Built America (Routledge, 2015), Elite White Men Ruling (Routledge, 2017, with Kimberley Ducey), Racist America (4th edn, Routledge, 2019, with Kimberley Ducey), Rethinking Diversity Frameworks in Higher Education (Routledge, 2020, with Edna B. Chun), and The White Racial Frame (3rd edn, Routledge, 2020). He is the recipient of a 2012 Soka Gakkai International-USA Social Justice Award, the 2013 American Association for Affirmative Action’s Arthur Fletcher Lifetime Achievement Award, and three major American Sociological Association awards: W.E.B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award, the Cox-Johnson-Frazier Award (for research in the African American scholarly tradition), and the Public Understanding of Sociology Award. He was the 1999-2000 president of the American Sociological Association.