Why Is Meghan Sussex Always Expected to Speak While Other Royals Stay Silent?

For years, a familiar demand has followed Meghan Sussex wherever she goes. When a crisis erupts, when politics turn violent, when the moral temperature rises, the question reappears: why hasn’t Meghan spoken? It echoes Dave Chappelle’s famous joke about the sudden need to hear Ja Rule’s thoughts after 9/11.

That question resurfaced after Sundance 2026, when commentators fixated on the Sussexes’ decision not to publicly denounce ICE. The framing was predictable. Silence was recast as moral failure, and restraint became complicity. And once again, Meghan was positioned as the person who should carry the weight of a moment she did not create and cannot safely resolve.

This is not a new debate. In 2025, we wrote that Meghan was right to refuse the culture-warrior role so often imposed on Black women. What has changed since then is not the expectation, but the bluntness with which some groups try to enforce it on her.

Meghan Has Spoken — and Paid the Price

The call for Meghan to “finally speak up” relies on collective amnesia.

Before her marriage, she criticised Donald Trump openly. In 2020, she engaged in voter-registration advocacy, spoke about misinformation, joined civic initiatives, and addressed racial injustice following the murder of George Floyd. She named police killings directly. She said “Black Lives Matter” in a country where other tax-payer funeded royals would not.

Each time, the response escalated. Her words were framed as dangerous, illegitimate, and politically improper. Media figures demanded she lose her titles. A sitting US president publicly targeted her while pointedly wishing luck to Prince Harry, as if her presence itself were a liability.

That backlash is essential to understanding why Meghan chooses her battles, particularly after years of public hostility. It is the context commentators now pretend does not exist.

When Silence Is Only a Sin for Black Women

Activist language is often stripped of context and repurposed as discipline. Quotes about silence and neutrality circulate online as if they apply evenly to everyone. They do not.

Black women in America have long been expected to speak first, endure longest, and sacrifice most. When they step back, their restraint is framed as abandonment rather than survival. This pattern is not theoretical. It is documented across civil-rights history, feminist scholarship, and contemporary political life.

The irony is difficult to ignore. Martin Luther King Jr. acknowledged he was tired of having to fight and was nevertheless killed for his work. His words are now invoked to criticise Black women who choose safety over perpetual exposure to harm.

The Racial Economy of Risk

White commentators can demand statements without consequence. Meghan Sussex cannot. She lives with documented threats, revoked security, immigration scrutiny tied to her husband, and the responsibility of protecting two young children. Asking her to wear a pin or issue a statement is not a symbolic gesture, as it was when some celebrities posted a black square during the height of the Black Lives Matter protests. It is a demand that she absorb real risk on behalf of others. Moral urgency is often aestheticised by those who will never bear its consequences.

Black women understood those stakes long before the rest of the country caught up. In 2024, more than 92 percent of Black American women voted for Kamala Harris, fully aware of what was at risk. They voted for a candidate they believed would not unleash the horrors now unfolding. Many white voters and other minority groups made a different choice, backing Donald Trump and the policies that followed. Black women watched, warned, and voted anyway—only to be told that an educated Black woman with no criminal record was still not good enough to lead the most powerful nation in the world.

The consequences were swift. Since then, more than 300,000 Black women have lost jobs. Racial hostility has intensified. And now, some of the very people who enabled this outcome are demanding that Black women protest alongside them, as if responsibility can be redistributed after the damage is done.

There is nothing noble about asking those who warned you to clean up the mess you ignored. It is not fun being Cassandra, surrounded by people who dismissed the prophecy, only to insist she fix the aftermath. As Harriet Tubman once observed, she could not save everyone, because some were not ready to leave the plantation.

Why Black People Are Not Required to Stop Living

There is another expectation embedded in this discourse: that Black people must pause their lives during tragedy. Posting joy, hobbies, or ordinary routines is treated as disrespectful. Silence is scrutinised. Normalcy is policed.

But for Black communities, there is always another tragedy. Michael Brown. Sandra Bland. George Floyd. Grenfell. Windrush. State violence is not episodic. It is structural.

Expecting Black people to live in permanent mourning while others resume normal life is not solidarity. It is an extraction.

For Black immigrants, this truth is unavoidable. Black Americans have carried civil-rights struggles that expanded freedoms for everyone, including those who now look down on them or demand more. Civil-rights protections and diversity initiatives were built on Black sacrifice, yet their greatest beneficiaries have often been white women and other groups who now feel entitled to Black labour without reciprocity.

The Hypocrisy of the Royal Commentariat

What makes this moment especially revealing is how narrow the outrage remains. The same small group of royal commentators repeatedly directs its demands downward. They do not pressure the tax-payer funded royals to speak out. They do not ask why senior royals remain silent. A recent example is Prince Harry being the only royal to speak out against Donald Trump’s disgusting remarks about British troops. Neither King Charles III nor Prince William said anything to challenge Trump or publicly support the troops.

They certainly do not ask why Kate Middleton, who was publicly warm and visibly comfortable around Donald Trump, has never been pressed to speak out—despite Trump’s long record of attacking and demonising Meghan. If moral responsibility truly followed proximity to power, it would be reasonable to ask whether the so-called popular “English rose,” whom Trump praised as “beautiful,” might use her whiteness and royal privilege to challenge him?

Instead, the demand circles back to the same figure. Meghan must speak, she must lead and she must prove care.

Kate’s brief appearance at the Sarah Everard vigil was framed by the media as women’s activism, even though senior police later acknowledged it was a work obligation. In the aftermath, police confusion and media reporting went so far as to incorrectly accuse Meghan Sussex of breaking the law at the vigil—an error that effectively shielded Kate from scrutiny. Kate was permitted to attend despite COVID restrictions, while many other women were arrested for doing the same, yet she did not speak out in support of those detained for protesting against women violence at the hand of the police. Her diary remains one of the lightest among the taxpayer-funded royals. If silence is suddenly a moral emergency, history suggests she will not be the one expected to resolve it.

Refusing the Culture-Warrior Role Is Agency

Meghan Sussex is not a shield. And she is not a sacrificial symbol for other people’s politics.

She has spoken when it mattered, and she has paid the price for it. Her choice to exercise restraint now is not abandonment. It is accountability—to herself, her family, and the very real risks that come with being a mixed-race Black woman who has already been publicly targeted by the very administration so many want her to speak out against.

The real question, then, is not why Meghan has not spoken. It is why so many refuse to accept that Black women are allowed to stop performing salvation on demand.

Silence chosen for safety is not betrayal. It is self-preservation in a culture that still expects Black women to give until there is nothing left.

There is also a lingering resentment at play: the belief that because Meghan and Prince Harry stood up to the royal family and survived, they should now stand in for every social ill, regardless of the cost. As if defying one institution obligates them to absorb the danger of all others. In a world where people are killed for their views, that expectation is not principled—it is reckless.

What critics consistently ignore is that Harry and Meghan have already shown that actions matter more than optics. Through their philanthropy, they fund, support, and advocate for causes with tangible outcomes. When the Los Angeles fires struck, they showed up and helped on the ground—even as the media rushed to question their sincerity.

Apparently, the problem was not the work itself.

Perhaps they should have worn a pin becuase that will shame Trump.