The Scapegoating of Meghan and Harry

Why it's dangerous to disrupt a myth.

As I've observed the reaction to Prince Harry’s new book and the Netflix special he did with his wife, Meghan Markle, I’ve been amazed that I viewed the same series and read the same book that so many people—including journalists—have described as a whiny, entitled, cruel betrayal of a family deserving better treatment. Meghan and Harry, we are told, are angling to have the “last word” in a family battle that should have been settled behind closed doors.

It seems to me that they would like to have “a word.” Who could blame them?

Until they began speaking out and telling their side of the story, the narrative had been one hundred percent shaped by the royal family’s spin doctors and the ethically challenged British tabloids that treat hunting royals as sport, even after their psychotic stalking contributed to the death of Harry’s mother, Diana.

Yet there is a disturbing theme that runs through a lot of the criticisms of Harry and Meghan. The problem is not that members of the royal family fretted about the skin color of their future children or that William physically attacked Harry and threw him on the floor in a rage about Meghan. It’s not that Prince Charles and his stepmother Camilla, according to Harry, had his people plant negative stories about his sons in the media. It’s not that his family joked in front of a young Harry about how he was born to provide spare parts (a kidney, perhaps) if his brother William — the heir — needed it. Hilarious.

The real problem, we are told over and over again, is that Harry and Meghan had the audacity to criticize their family in public. It’s classless to “air dirty laundry.” If you pay attention, their critics rarely even bother to refute Harry and Meghan’s version of events. They are just outraged that they would say anything critical about the apparently morally unimpeachable royal family.

We should note that in this essay I am talking only about American reaction to this situation, not British. It is utterly bizarre to watch Americans falling all over themselves to defend a royal family in another country, especially one that happens to be the exact monarchy against which the United States was founded.

The quote that has occurred to me repeatedly as I have watched reactions to Harrry and Meghan is, “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

Harry and Meghan are a canvas on which people project their jealousies, fears and yes, unconscious biases. Nearly every critique includes a complaint that rich princes have no right to be unhappy or to complain. In order to believe this, you have to have mainlined the capitalist lie that money and power equals happiness, despite all evidence to the contrary.

When people critique Meghan, the underlying theme is that she’s an ingrate. She is a princess and should be happy. This is yet another lie that lives deep in our unconscious, thanks to nonstop sexist indoctrination, that life begins for a women when her prince shows up to sweep her off her feet. This lie would be projected onto Meghan no matter what, but the fact that she is biracial dials the rage up about ten million notches. I am old enough to have lived through the Diana period, and even when she was “airing dirty laundry,” she was never the recipient of the kind of incoherent rage from Americans that is being directed at Meghan Markle.

Meghan and Harry are disrupting a myth, and for that they will be demonized. It’s not just the general mythology around the royal family that they are disrupting. Harry is fundamentally disrupting a story that most of us loved. It’s one about how he and his beloved brother William were inseparable and devoted to one another throughout their lives, especially after their mother was killed. But it’s not true, according to Harry, who it seems to me would know.

When people challenge myths, they are inevitably scapegoated to distract from the uncomfortable truth they are telling. Invariably the system in question — a family, an institution, or in this case, both — will choose a scapegoat (called the “identified patient” in psychology) to heap all the sins of the family/institution upon. They will claim, for example, that if only child X wasn’t so horrible, the family would be happy. This way, others in the family share no responsibility for the dysfunction of the family. It can all be laid at the feet of one child who is ruining everything for everyone else.

Part of the scapegoting — and a significant component of what is happening to Harry and Meghan — is gaslighting. First you are abused and lied to, and then when you confront it you are called whiny, weak, crazy, overly emotional, ungrateful, selfish, and so on. Sound familiar?

Abusers are always supported by systems that seek to enforce the abuse, which is what makes the abuse feel so overwhelming. You know what is happening, but the abuser has convinced everyone around you that you are crazy, have anger issues or are a narcissist. In a family, the other members will adopt the story about you being the problem because it’s beneficial to them to do. Harry and Meghan’s problem is much bigger, though, because they are also challenging two institutions — the monarchy and the media — which have teamed up to amplify the gaslighting.

The fact is, the person being scapegoated usually is angry (and may even have been driven crazy by the gaslighting) and with good cause. But that anger becomes evidence to prove they are the problem. It’s worth noting that this is why when Black people confront racism or women confront misogyny, they are often accused of being “too angry.” They are being scapegoated and gaslit. The system isn’t the problem; their reaction to the system is.

I’ve seen people criticize Harry for his anger with no sense of why he might be angry that his family has lied about him; that his wife and mother were both driven to the brink of suicide by the British tabloids and his family; that his mother would likely be alive but for the stalking of the British tabloids, which are populated with people so deranged that they took pictures of Diana as she lay dying after they chased her through a tunnel. Harry writes of reading the police report of the crash that killed his mother. As he noticed the reflection of the tabloid press in the photos, he was struck with this haunting thought: “The last thing mummy saw in this world was a flashbulb.”

But why is he so angry?

Scapegoats also are always punished for not being perfect. So if Meghan and Harry say something that seems contradictory, it’s proof they are narcissistic liars rather than the likelier explanation, which is they are highly traumatized people, and traumatized people sometimes get facts mixed up. (If you don’t understand how being hunted by the paparazzi and having your family plant stories about you in the media — or in Meghan’s case, having your father take money from the tabloids for pictures of her — are traumatic, then I don’t know what to say.)

This is why women who have been sexually assaulted often can’t remember everything about what happened and will often contradict themselves. Any discrepencies are then used to prove they are lying, even though the science around what trauma does to your brain is well documented. Also, even people who haven’t been traumatized mix things up or make seemingly contradictory statements. In fact, abusers always do. But those are excused, while the scapegoats’ behavior lives under a magnifying glass.

People seem to end up either being super fans or super foes of Meghan and Harry. But you don’t have to live in extremes. It’s possible to recognize that they, like literally everyone, are not perfect. You don’t have to love everything about them to recognize what is happening here.

Which brings me back to the quote about seeing things as we are, not as they are. The people who are more empathetic to Harry and Meghan are either people who have themselves been scapegoats, or part of a group of people who have been scapegoated, or they are people who identify with those who are being harmed by people with power.

This story can’t be understood without talking about power. Who has it and who is abusing it? It seems undeniable that the monarchy and their unholy alliance with the British tabloids are the ones with the unmatched power in this situation. Yes, Meghan and Harry have power compared to the average person, but not compared with what they have been up against.

Speaking out—through Oprah, Netflix and now a book—is an attempt to even that power differential. They are using what power they have to respond to the story that was created about them. It’s worth noting there are, at a minimum, a lot of agenda driven factual inaccuracies in that narrative. They are being predictably demonized for standing up for themselves.

Who in this story do you identify with and why?

What makes this topic interesting to me is not Meghan and Harry per se, or the dirt about the royal family, but what our reactions to them say about us as individuals and a society. In this case, F. Scott Fitzgerald had it half right: the rich may be different from you and me, but the British royal family seems to be our Rorschach—the image through which we reveal ourselves.