Yahoo News, March 2021
As Meghan Markle’s Sunday night interview with Oprah Winfrey continues to break the internet, some are taking to social media to call out the specific brand of racist, sexist treatment she discussed having endured during her time with the royal family as “misogynoir.”
That “is really the most easily observed outcome for her marrying into the royal family,” says Meredith Clark of the Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies, explaining that “[Black folks] talk about the differences between how Black women are treated in media and how that differs from the way white women and really women of all backgrounds are treated, [but] with Meghan Markle, we don’t have to make those comparisons fictitiously. We can make those comparisons by looking at the different headlines [about Kate Middleton vs. Meghan].”
The term, coined in 2008 by Northeastern University women’s studies professor Moya Bailey, author of the forthcoming Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance, and Trudy (aka @thetrudz), a one-named writer, artist and social critic, has only recently been gaining ground in popular culture. It describes “the specific combination of anti-Black and misogynistic representation in visual culture and digital spaces that shapes broader ideas about Black women.”
