Meghan Markle's father says he prevented a doctor from writing that she was Black instead of mixed race on her birth certificate

Mikhaila Friel
Updated ·3 min read

  • Meghan Markle's father, Thomas, said he argued with a doctor over her birth certificate.

  • Thomas said that the doctor wanted to write that Meghan was Black while he wanted it to say "mixed."

  • "I had no problem with Black or white, but in my mind, it should have been mixed," he said.

The Duchess of Sussex's estranged father, Thomas Markle, said he didn't allow a doctor to write that she was Black on her birth certificate.

In a YouTube video with celebrity photographer Karl Larsen that was posted on Sunday, Thomas said he had to "argue with the doctor" in order to have him write that Meghan was mixed race.

"I even had to argue with the doctor, and have him write that she was mixed on the birth certificate, because he wanted to mark down 'Black,'" Thomas said in the video. "I had no problem with Black or white, but in my mind, it should have been mixed."

Meghan was born in Los Angeles to parents Thomas Markle, who is white, and Doria Ragland, who is Black, on August 4, 1981.

Thomas and Ragland got married in 1979 and divorced in 1987, Hollywood Life reports.

doria ragland
Meghan Markle waves to crowds on the way to her wedding alongside her mom, Doria Ragland, on May 19, 2018.Richard Heathcote/Getty Images

Up until 1999, individuals in the US could only mark one box to indicate their heritage on birth certificates, according to US Birth Certificates. The website says that the five categories for race in the US are: American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, Black or African American, Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and White.

From 1790 to 1950, American census takers who were of multiracial ancestry were either counted as a single race or "classified into categories that mainly consisted of gradations of Black and white," according to the Pew Research Center paper, "Multiracial in America." From 1960, Americans were allowed to choose their own race, and in 2000 the option to officially identify with more than one race was introduced, according to the paper.

Meghan wrote an essay for Elle UK in 2016 about what it was like to try and find her identity as a mixed-race person growing up.

In the essay, Meghan said she had to complete a mandatory census in her seventh-grade English class at school, and was presented with a number of boxes to indicate ethnicity.

"You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other — and one half of myself over the other [...] I didn't tick a box," Meghan wrote.

"I left my identity blank — a question mark, an absolute incomplete — much like how I felt. When I went home that night, I told my dad what had happened. He said the words that have always stayed with me: 'If that happens again, you draw your own box,'" she wrote.

Representatives for the Duchess of Sussex did not immediately respond to Insider's request for comment.

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