Roxane Gay enjoys royal gossip and she cares a lot about the Duke and Duchess of Sussex. In December 2022, she wrote a NYT column about the Harry & Meghan Netflix series and the broader implications of what the Sussexit meant for the monarchy. Gay widely defended Harry and Meghan’s choices and their story, but at the end of her 2022 column, she noted: “Harry and Meghan seemed content to be part of the royal family if only the royal family had been willing to embrace change. But the monarchy doesn’t need to be changed. It needs to be dismantled. If Harry and Meghan were to have acknowledged that, it would have made their story infinitely more interesting.” That really is it, and Harry has said as much repeatedly – that he does not want to dismantle the racist, colonialist and sexist system, he just wanted that system to treat his wife better. Well, Roxane Gay has a new NYT column about the Sussexes’ imminent return to Britain: “Don’t Harry and Meghan Know Better?” Some highlights:

The reality of the Sussex story: As endearing as Meghan and Harry’s story was, reality was never far behind. The biggest crisis, of course, was that a woman of color was infiltrating the royal family and, more important, the royal bloodline, however diluted it may be at this point. What should have been merely fraught but manageable quickly became untenable. There was nothing Meghan could do that would have ever been good enough, and as she has detailed in the years since, the pressures from within and outside the royal family had a detrimental effect on her mental health. It’s kind of miraculous that their relationship has, to this point, endured.

Telling all: [Once they moved to California,] The Sussexes set about the business of raising their young family. They also settled some scores in a rather scorched-earth set of moves. There was “Harry & Meghan,” a Netflix documentary series that offered viewers a very curated look at their lives. It was all very bland and not particularly revealing but somehow watchable. The couple also sat down with Oprah Winfrey, a consummate interviewer, and bared if not all, then quite a lot. In that 2021 prime-time special, they both detailed the blatant racism, double standards and naked indifference, even cruelty, of the royal family. As Meghan, in particular, shared her story, you couldn’t help but wonder how she withstood it all. Theirs was a compelling performance, a closing argument in the matter of what precipitated such a drastic move toward respite and reinvention.

Harry’s Spare: In 2023, Harry published “Spare,” a lengthy memoir about growing up as the boy who always knew he would never be king. The prose was utilitarian and occasionally funny. Early in the memoir, he has a line about William’s “alarming baldness, more advanced than my own,” that makes me laugh every time I think of it. But mostly, Harry’s was a hollow story of knowing your place in life and being unduly constrained by it.

Harry’s struggles: Before marriage, Meghan made her own way in the world. She did it once, and she could do it again. Harry, on the other hand, had never known a civilian life in which he truly had to prove himself, in which he wasn’t lavishly celebrated by birthright. Little came of Harry’s attempts at media work. Most of the podcast ideas he proposed, for instance, were silly at best, and nothing happened with his one good idea, a series about fatherhood. Harry and Meghan must have hoped that distance and time would help him find his footing, but the most successful endeavors he had stateside were all connected to the very thing he was trying to escape: his royal lineage. He had to learn that when people aren’t by custom expected to like or pretend to like you, you have to bring something substantive to the table and when you don’t, the opportunities disappear. Making of this old world a new world remained elusive.

Public opinion: In some corners, Harry and Meghan were lauded for fighting for gilded independence (because Harry holds an amount of privilege from which he can never truly escape). Others said they were abandoning the royal family, being selfish, especially when the palace announced more than two years ago that Charles had cancer. A lot of people blamed Meghan for being too much of a diva, too difficult to work with, too American and, of course, too Black. No matter what you think about Harry and Meghan, race is the proverbial elephant in the room…. This is the power of bigotry: The monarchy has tolerated a breathtaking range of despicable behavior from assorted royals, but what they could not abide is a Black woman.

The crown of racism: People can attribute all of this royal family tension to ego or pettiness or a would-be king asserting his will over a never-will-be king, but that won’t change the painful reality that the king wears the heavy crown of racism and most of those in the current line of succession will, too.

The Sussexes know better: Given this state of affairs, it was quite surprising when news broke that Harry, Meghan and their two children are returning to live in Britain. They know better, this time around, about what to expect and how to navigate it. But they also have to, once more, figure out who they are, without the position or the power to which they were once adjacent. They will have to endure the notoriously cruel British press that has hounded them incessantly. They will have to figure out if they can, finally, make a home for themselves, one where they are welcomed and embraced without having to contort themselves into the shape the monarchy prefers. They will have to see if their relationship can continue to endure.

Integration in a burning house: In this next chapter of their not quite fairy tale, the Sussexes are caught between two complicated worlds, neither of which is particularly hospitable to their unique circumstances. In the New Yorker essay “Letter From a Region in My Mind,” James Baldwin asks, “Do I really want to be integrated into a burning house?” Baldwin asks that question in a very different context, but I suspect it is nonetheless one Harry and Meghan have been trying to answer for years.

[From The NY Times]

This is broadly how I feel at this point as well, and James Baldwin’s quote is apt. It feels like we’re waiting for the other shoe to drop, to finally learn the *actual* reason for their move, because none of this makes sense in the broader context of the past seven years. You can say a lot about Harry and Meghan, both good and bad, but no one can say that the Sussexes have no idea what they’re willingly walking into this time around.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red, Cover Images.