Meghan Markle’s dad has revealed he stopped doctors writing "black" on the Duchess of Sussex’s birth certificate.
Thomas Markle said he got into a heated argument after insisting to the medics he wanted his daughter identified as “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,'" Mr Markle said in a video he posted on YouTube.
He continued: “I had no problem with black or white, but in my mind, it should have been mixed.”
At the time of her birth on August 4, 1981, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) ruled that if one parent was white, the child would be assigned the race of the other parent.
Meghan Markle and her husband Prince Harry
Caitlin Ochs
Thomas Markle speaking to Karl Larsen
YouTube
This caused confusion for parents of multiracial children like, Meghan's dad who is white and her mum, Doria Ragland who is black.
In 2000, the option to officially identify with more than one race was introduced.
This rule was updated just before the 2000 US census.
Meghan said she faced the same issue when in school when she was told to fill out a census and identify her race, but it didn’t have an option for “mixed race”.
She wrote in a piece for Elle Magazine: “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.
"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.
“You could only choose one, but that would be to choose one parent over the other – and one half of myself over the other.
“My teacher told me to check the box for Caucasian 'because that’s how you look, Meghan.'
"I put down my pen. Not as an act of defiance, but rather a symptom of my confusion.
“I couldn’t bring myself to do that, to picture the pit-in-her-belly sadness my mother would feel if she were to find out. So, I didn’t tick a box.
"I left my identity blank – a question mark, an absolute incomplete – much like how I felt."