When it comes to celebrities and the royal family, it’s generally understood that not all of us will like everyone. And that’s OK! We can all like or dislike whomever we want, especially since most of us do our liking and disliking from the privacy of our own homes, or on our own devices while speaking to our 400 Facebook friends.
Disliking and liking celebrities and other public figures gets significantly more complicated if you’re doing so on a larger platform. Like, say, a televised news show. This is especially true if you express your dislike with racially loaded language that most of the world finds disappointing, to say the least.
So when Lynda McLaughlin, a producer for Sean Hannity, decided to get on the air and call Meghan Markle “very uppity,” it makes sense that people had big reactions. For starters, the word “uppity” has historically been used against black people — and especially black women — for a long time. As a person who works in the media, it’s unlikely that the producer didn’t know what she was doing when she used it.
The word “uppity” has always had racist connotations, and a lot of those were brought to the forefront during the administration of President Barack Obama when conservative media outlets repeatedly used the word to describe both President Obama and Michelle Obama. The word has roots in the South, where racist white people used it to describe black people who, as the Atlantic put it, “didn’t know their place.” The word is also almost always followed by more vulgar racial slurs and basically falls under the category of “Words You Should Just Go Ahead and Remove From Your Vocabulary.”
While on the show, Sean Hannity said, “I didn’t like that Meghan didn’t even get on the phone as she was in Canada, and she was invited to be a part of that meeting. That I didn’t like. That, to me is—” when Lynda cut in, “Yeah, she is very uppity. She is one of those liberal elitists, you know?”
The conversation veered from there, with Sean pointing out that he wasn’t concerned about the politics of the couple. And that is all well and good, but it’s disappointing (though perhaps not surprising) that he didn’t correct Lynda’s comment. Meghan and Prince Harry have been very vocal about the racism she has experienced at the hands of the British press, and if this is any indication, she may not get much better over here in North America, either.