Can we stop measuring Meghan Markle’s blackness?

On November 27th, following the announcement of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry’s engagement, Vogue.com tweeted one of its articles with the caption, “Black girls all over the world can finally look at the royal family and see someone like them,” to which Black Twitter responded, “LOL bye.” (Actual quote pull from the comment frontlines, because journalism.)

The tweet pushed to an essay by writer Tariro Mzezewa, in which she describes the significance of Markle’s entry into the British royal family. Mzezewa sees Markle’s engagement to Prince Harry as positive movement in an aging (white) aristocracy that has superficially promoted diversity but not fostered it within its own family tree.

multicultural and multiracial country with plenty of its own flaws to consider. The only way for the royal family to remain relevant is to reflect its increasingly diverse reality. Just as the United States wasn’t suddenly rid of its racism when Barack Obama was elected, Britain won’t suddenly be rid of its race problems because Markle will soon be part of the royal family, but perhaps the issues that matter to women of color will be given more weight; and maybe the causes she champions in the developing world will soon make their way to the royal dining table,” she writes.

Vogue‘s tweet is actually a modification of the next line in Mzezewa’s essay: “What’s for certain is that for once, girls all over the world can finally look at the British royal family and see someone like them.” Someone added “Black” before “girls,” and readers (who maybe didn’t read the essay to see the contextual foregrounding or the fact that it came from a black woman) reacted. Fast.