Meghan Markle criticized for comments on cinematic LA riots
She chats in the piece: “It was cinematic in a way that I don’t think many people can understand… it was so visual. Smoke everywhere. People were driving around with the backs of their SUVs open.”
Markle — who was raised middle-class, away from those who were uprising — adds of the looters who took to the streets during the uprising: “I saw people running with boxes of diapers, breaking windows, so much fire and ash falling from the sky that it felt like snow.”
She later adds that she thinks the City of Angels is “resilient,” saying, “It was scary, but LA survived.”
The interview has sparked a wave of criticism from local residents who lived through the unrest, and from media commentators who say the Duchess of Sussex’s portrayal of the riots is at best self-dramatizing and, at worst, historically tone-deaf.
An LA source said: “She’s acting like seeing some looters in diapers makes her a war survivor with PTSD – like some kind of veteran. It’s a joke and embarrassing.
“People died. Neighborhoods burned down. To everyone who was there, it wasn’t a movie scene, it was people’s lives.”
Another town resident raged: “She says the ash ‘felt like snow.’ We lost half the city. Who’s talking liked this?”
Yet another critic joked: “Meghan didn’t grow up in a ghetto – someone needs to tell her she didn’t experience Boyz n the Hood!”
And someone said: “Meghan says, ‘I saw ash falling from the sky.’ Those who were there saw fear, violence, poverty and boarded up shops. And the way Meghan tells it is almost like a voice-over from a movie, with herself obviously playing the leading role.”
Another critic said: “Meghan always frames events by how they shaped her – not what they meant to the wider community. That’s what’s so infuriating about this.”
Some in the entertainment industry were more blunt.
A Hollywood publicist said, “She wants gravitas, so she adapts and exploits massive trauma to make it sound like she’s carrying major trauma. The problem is that everyone in LA over 40 remembers those days, and the city has a long memory. You can’t turn the riots into an origin story if it had virtually nothing to do with you.”
And she says, “LA survived.” “Yes, a lot of people did that, but the difference is they didn’t end up getting a Netflix deal.”
Markle grew up in a middle-class and later upper-middle-class environment in Los Angeles.
She grew up in a thriving neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley area of the city – not classified as an underserved area.
In one episode of her podcastshe addressed rumors that she was “straight from Compton” – and made it clear that she has never lived in the crime-ridden area.
Her now estranged father, Thomas Markle, was an Emmy Award-winning television director who worked on hit shows including Married… with Children – and he used some of the $750,000 he won in the California State Lottery in 1990 to send his wannabe actress daughter to private school.
Her mother, Doria Ragland, was a social worker and yoga instructor. Markle’s latest comments on the LA riots follow similar stories she delivered in a 2020 speech to students at Immaculate Heart and in a 2015 essay for Elle.
In 2020, she told graduating students, “I was 11 or 12 years old when I was about to start Immaculate Heart high school in the fall and it was the LA riots, which were also caused by a senseless act of racism.
“And I remember the curfew and I remember rushing home and on that drive home, seeing ash falling from the sky, smelling the smoke and seeing the smoke pouring out of buildings.
“And seeing people running out of buildings with bags and looting.
“And I remember seeing guys in the back of a van with nothing but guns and rifles in their hands, and I remember driving up to the house and seeing the tree that had been there all along, completely charred.
“And those memories don’t go away.”
In her 2015 article for ElleMarkle warned that the protests in Ferguson and Baltimore showed that America had not healed old wounds.
She said: “After the racial unrest in Ferguson and Baltimore, the tensions that have long been simmering beneath the surface in the US have boiled over in the saddest way.
“And as a biracial woman, I watch with horror as both sides of a culture I define as my own fall victim to media spin, perpetuating stereotypes and reminding us that perhaps the United States has only made connections about the problems that have never been healed at the root.”
Markle has also spoken about hearing an angry motorist call her mother the ‘N-word’ – and revealed that white people have made offensive jokes around her without realizing she is biracial.
The LA riots occurred in South Central Los Angeles on April 29, after a jury acquitted four Los Angeles Police Department officers charged with using excessive force in the arrest and assault of Rodney King.
Thousands of people rioted for six days after the verdict was announced, and were only quelled after the California National Guard, the U.S. Army, and several federal law enforcement agencies deployed more than 10,000 armed responders.
By the time the riots were over, 63 people had been killed, 2,383 others were injured – and more than 12,000 people were arrested. It is estimated that $1 billion in property damage was caused, making this the most destructive period of local unrest in US history – before that record was surpassed by the cost of the Black Lives Matter riots that exploded after the police killing of George Floyd in 2020.
