Meghan Markle's Dad Didn't Want The Duchess of Sussex Identified As Black On Birth Certificate

In a YouTube video with celebrity photographer Karl Larsen, Meghan Markle’s estranged father Thomas revealed that he fought to have mixed-race put on the Duchess of Sussex’s birth certificate after a doctor insisted on identifying her as Black.

“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,’” Markle said per The Independent. “I had no problem with Black or white, but in my mind, it should have been mixed.”

Meghan was born on Aug. 4, 1981, in Los Angeles to Thomas, who is white, and her mother Doria Ragland, who is Black. At the time, the rule was that if one parent was white, the child would be assigned the race of the other parent.

A Centers for Disease Control and Prevention document explains that it wasn’t until after 1999 that the National Center for Health Statistics updated its rules in time for the 2000 U.S. census.

The changes allow for multiple boxes to be ticked when answering race-related questions about race, which is defined by self-identification.

The Markle patriarch also recalled a young Meghan encountering a school project in which she was asked to identify her race but only allowed to tick one box. The Duchess, in an essay she wrote for Elle in July 2015, would tackle the same incident.

“There was a mandatory census I had to complete in my English class – you had to check one of the boxes to indicate your ethnicity: white, black, Hispanic, or Asian,” she said. “There I was (my curly hair, my freckled face, my pale skin, my mixed race) looking down at these boxes, not wanting to mess up, but not knowing what to do.”

Meghan said her teacher advised her to check the box for Caucasian because she looked like that. However, it made her more confused, opting to leave her identity blank.

The mother of two is currently embroiled in a defamation lawsuit filed by her half-sister Samantha Markle, who, according to Thomas, would be getting his support throughout the court proceedings.

Sam alleges in court documents that Meghan made “false and malicious lies” about her both in the Sussexes’ Oprah Winfrey interview and in the “Finding Freedom” biography.

Meanwhile, Twitter moved to ban the older Markle’s current account following attempts to evade a previous ban on the social media platform in 2019.

At the time, the 57-year-old created and used various accounts to spread unfounded claims that the Duchess of Sussex was never pregnant, the Daily Mail noted.