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Meghan Markle’s Netflix cooking show, With Love, Meghan premiered on March 4 as a part of Prince Harry & Meghan of Sussex’s multi-year production deal with the gargantuan streaming service, and its debut has been marred with exaggerated vitriol from critics. The Hollywood Reporter called the show “oddly-timed and unrelatable.” The Guardian said the show was “so pointless” and suggested the royals ought to “kiss the Netflix deal goodbye.” The Daily Mail said the show was “so boring, it was almost compelling,” and Slate accused Meghan of “cosplaying Martha Stewart.”
In each episode, the Duchess of Sussex invites audiences alongside her and her affluent friends as she creates essential oil-infused candles made from melted beeswax from her family hive, crimson-red hibiscus tea brewed with the warmth of California sunlight, and beer-battered Korean fried chicken with a side of watermelon kimchi. It’s easy to forget, amid the glitterati, that Meghan of Sussex was raised by a single Black mom in a suburb of Los Angeles County in the 1980s.
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Meghan Markle Netflix Cooking Show
Meghan grew up in Canoga Park, California, a stone’s throw away from the big studio-set universe of Hollywood. The neighborhood is nestled down in “The Valley,” which is named for its geographic location situated between the Santa Monica mountains of the San Fernando Valley. The area got culturally stigmatized as a haven for wealthy white girls because of a 1982 hit song, but the small town is actually bustling with diversity (Latino, Korean, and Black families call the area home) and humble household incomes.
Meghan describes herself as a “latchkey” kid in her new Netflix lifestyle docu-series — meaning, it was normal for her to come home from elementary school to an empty house and microwave-warmed TV dinners and fast food as the daughter of divorced parents. Sounds painfully relatable, right?
While Meghan’s present-day reality is anything but relatable (as she basks in the rolling scenic hills of Montecito in her lush gardens), her origin story is one that echoes through the heart-walls of many; in fact, data shows that almost half of Black children are raised in a single-parent home. We talk about breaking generational curses and wanting a future that is filled with more ease, more love, and more pleasure for our families, so then why is Meghan’s present-day soft life so triggering?
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The #softlife trend gained traction online in the early 2020s, as millions of women took to TikTok and Instagram to mark their moments of stress-free living (think: spa dates and Saturday afternoon mimosas) with the hashtag. The movement was a stark departure from the hustle-crazed era of the 2010s, with women shedding their “girl boss” corporate titles for tea-time and “girl moss.”
The trend paved the way for the rise of social sensations like Nara Smith, whose trad-wife-from-scratch aesthetics have attracted the eyes and curiosity of millions. Obviously, there is a hefty appetite for this sort of content, which begs the question, how does the public decide who gets to participate in soft life in peace, and who doesn’t? Are we really that collectively uncomfortable when a Black woman isn’t serving others (outside of herself or her own loved ones) or serving a look?
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Black Women Deserve To Live A Soft Life
It’s not a stretch to see traces of the old “Black mammy” archetype loaded in the smoking gunshots against Meghan’s Montecito rested lifestyle series. The “mammy,” a racist and “romanticized” caricature of Black women’s lives post-Civil war, positioned Black women in media, and real life, as being only useful as “the help” to white people or “the help” to some overarching public cause.
It’s a burden that white women in the public eye don’t have to contend with. Martha Stewart, for example, built her billion-dollar housewife empire in the ‘90s while the crack epidemic ravaged a large swath of America. Stewart’s platform, built on lavish hosting and cooking recipes, is viewed as iconic, despite being nestled in a time in American history where that way of life was out of reach for most.
However, when Black women operate autonomously and outside of this “humble servant of the world” label, at any moment, they make themselves a target — and it’s been this way for generations. Since the Berlin Conference, which spurred on the colonization of Africa by European powers in the 1800s, outsiders have been determined to chart the destiny of the descendants of African people who have never, and will never, belong to them, and that desire for control still sparks up in the collective consciousness of our society.
It’s the ugly root of why Meghan’s marriage to Prince Harry awoke so much hate —the pervasive image of a reigning Black princess was too powerful for a world who feels most comfortable with Black women in the role of serf. Underneath every anger-tinged sentence about what Meghan is doing on screen, whether it’s baking “beautiful-on-the-inside” cakes with freshly-picked raspberries or hiking ocean-view trails with friends, is the sentiment that there is something else she should be doing. Perhaps it’s her freedom as a Black woman, not the content itself, that ticks critics off.
Surely, a divorcee, who is a product of a divorced household, who was once the target of a racial hate campaign on a global scale, is allowed to enjoy slow moments filled with edible flower sprinkles and lavender-scented Himalayan bath salts in the comfort of her new life with her husband and children, right?
That’s aspirational content for any descendant of the transatlantic slave-trade who is looking to break some patterns off of their bloodline. For Meghan, that meant creating a future where her kids could come home to a happily married mom making fresh, home-cooked meals, a pleasure she, as a kid, would never know.
Since imagination is how we chart a new world for Black lives, maybe the time is ripe for us all to lean into some California dreaming. If somewhere over the rainbow fruit platter, Meghan can dream of dollops of yogurt clouds, why in the world can’t I?
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