Meghan Markle Opens Up About Her Experience with Racism

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It's impossible to deny that racism that still exists in America, and the only way to deal with the problem is head on. By talking about it, recognizing it, and never staying silent—especially when you have a platform. Suits actress (and girlfriend to Prince Harry) Meghan Markle used hers to pen a moving essay about the racism her grandparents endured—recalling a story her grandfather told her about being forced to eat in the parking lot at Kentucky Fried Chicken.

"That story still haunts me," she writes. "It reminds me of how young our country is. How far we've come and how far we still have to come. It makes me think of the countless black jokes people have shared in front of me, not realizing I am mixed, unaware that I am the ethnically ambiguous fly on the wall. It makes me wonder what my parents experienced as a mixed race couple. It echoes the time my mom and I were leaving a concert at The Hollywood Bowl, and a woman called her the 'N' word because she was taking too long to pull out of the parking spot. I remember how hot my skin felt. How it scorched the air around me."

Markle ends her essay thanking Martin Luther King Jr. and other notable leaders/thinkers, as well as her parents for "choosing each other not for the 'color of their skin but the content of their character.'"