Prince Harry Says He Had ‘No Idea’ What Unconscious Racial Bias Was Before Meghan Markle
Prince Harry is opening up about how being with his wife, Meghan Markle, helped him learn more about unconscious racial bias (something he was previously unfamiliar with).
On Monday, the Duke of Sussex participated in an interview with Black Lives Matter activist Patrick Hutchinson as part of GQ’s Heroes conference. During the virtual chat, which was shot from Harry’s new home in Montecito, the duo discussed the BLM movement and unconscious racial bias. Turns out, Harry was unaware of the latter, that is, until he began to step into his “wife’s shoes.”
“Unconscious bias, from my understanding, having the upbringing and the education that I had, I had no idea what it was. I had no idea it existed,” Harry said during the 40-minute interview. “And then, sad as it is to say, it took me many, many years to realize it, especially then living a day or a week in my wife's shoes.”
He continued, “Whether it's politics or whether it's the media, where if you're not aware of your own bias and you're not aware of the culture within your system, then how are we ever going to progress? How are we ever going to get to that point where there is more fairness? Because it's not a zero-sum game, right? Everyone benefits if the Black community gets treated the way they should be treated.”
This isn’t the first time the duke has addressed the subject. In 2019, he also touched on the topic while speaking with Jane Goodall for British Vogue.
“So many people don’t understand [unconscious bias], why they feel the way that they do,” he said in the September issue. “Despite the fact that if you go up to someone and say, ‘What you’ve just said, or the way that you’ve behaved, is racist’—they’ll turn around and say, ‘I’m not a racist.’ I’m not saying that you’re a racist, I’m just saying that your unconscious bias is proving that, because of the way that you’ve been brought up, the environment you’ve been brought up in, suggests that you have this point of view—unconscious point of view—where naturally you will look at someone in a different way. And that is the point at which people start to have to understand.”
Looks like paying attention to the 39-year-old duchess’s experiences and listening to what she has to say has taught him a quite lot about racial inequality.
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