Prince Harry and Meghan Markle set to receive NAACP award for racial justice work

Prince Harry and Meghan Markle will attend the NAACP Awards on Saturday where they will receive the prestigious President’s Awards to mark their special achievement for ‘distinguished public service’.

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who live in Montecito, California, join the likes of Muhammad Ali, Rihanna, LeBron James, Bill Clinton and Venus and Serena Williams in picking up the top gong.

The ceremony is their first major Hollywood event since leaving the royal family, and will see them rub shoulders with host Anthony Anderson and dozens of A-listers. 

‘It’s a true honour to be recognized by President Derrick Johnson and the NAACP, whose efforts to propel racial justice and civil rights are as vital today as they were nearly 115 years ago,’ the couple said in a statement.

‘We’re proud to support the NAACP’s work and to also partner with the organisation on the newly created annual NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award, which will be bestowed to Dr. Safiya Noble as part of the 53rd NAACP Image Awards.’      

The ceremony will take place in the US on Sunday and is available to view on BET UK on My5 from Monday.  

‘We’re thrilled to present this award to Prince Harry and Meghan, The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who together have heeded the call to social justice and have joined the struggle for equity both in the US and around the world,’ said Derrick Johnson, President and CEO of the NAACP. 

‘Not only do they continue to lead by example, The Duke and Duchess have also decided to inspire the next generation of activists through the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award, ensuring the support and recognition of generations of civil rights leaders to come.’

The NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award, supported by Archewell Foundation and administered by the NAACP, is a newly created annual award that recognises leaders creating transformational change—at the intersection of social justice and technology—to advance civil and human rights. 

The Duke and Duchess of Sussex, who live in Montecito, California, join the likes of Muhammad Ali, Rihanna, LeBron James, Bill Clinton and Venus and Serena Williams in picking up the top gong.

The 2022 inaugural recipient of the NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award is renowned author and scholar Dr. Safiya Noble, who has pioneered the study of how digital technologies intersect with culture, race, and gender and previously worked with Harry at the Aspen Institute Think Tank to tackle ‘fake news’.

Who is Dr. Safiya Noble? 

Dr. Noble is an internet studies scholar and Professor of Gender Studies and African American Studies at UCLA where she serves as the Co-Founder and Faculty Director of the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry (C2i2), which is a partner to Archewell Foundation.

In 2021, she was recognised as a MacArthur Fellow for her ground-breaking work on algorithmic discrimination, which enabled her founding of Equity Engine, a non-profit committed to creating the conditions for Black women and women of color to thrive through access to education, investments, mentorship, and mutual aid. She is the author of a best-selling book on racist and sexist algorithmic bias in commercial search engines, entitled Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (NYU Press), which has been widely-praised in scholarly and popular publications.

‘At both the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry, and at the Equity Engine, we are working toward greater possibilities for vulnerable people,’ said Dr. Safiya Umoja Noble. ‘Digital civil rights and protections from harm on the internet are a crucial pathway to a more just world, and I am grateful for the support of the NAACP and Archewell Foundation for contributing to our efforts to create more compassionate and democratic societies where Black women and women of colour can thrive, too.’

The NAACP-Archewell Digital Civil Rights Award seeks to recognise long-term contributors to the digital rights space while also supporting a new generation of visionaries working to expand equity, including issues related to discrimination, misinformation, privacy, countering biases, limiting profiling and surveillance, improving transparency, increasing diversity in the tech sector, and more. 

 Each year, the honouree will be awarded a $100,000 (£75,000) unrestricted stipend to be used to advance new work, expand leadership and expertise, or continue to make an impact in the field.  

The awards will include a performance by Mary J. Blige and with appearances with Issa Rae, Kerry Washington, LL Cool J, Michael Strahan, Morgan Freeman, Nikole Hannah-Jones, Paula Patton, Questlove, Samuel L. Jackson, Simu Liu, Tiffany Haddish and Zendaya. 

Harry and Meghan have previously spoken out of racial justice issues – including sharing their support for the Black Lives Matter movement while Meghan has discussed her experience of racism within the royal family.

In 2020, Prince Harry revealed his ‘awakening’ to the discrimination faced by black people after meeting his wife.

Meghan Markle has praised Black Lives Matter protests in America after the death of George Floyd as ‘beautiful’ – but said this only applied to ‘peaceful protest’ and admitted many people found them ‘inflammatory’. 

Speaking on Zoom to the Evening Standard, Harry also weighed in on Diversity’s controversial BLM dance routine on Britain’s Got Talent and said he was ‘surprised’ by the negative comments it had received.

In a separate article for the newspaper, the couple said: ‘As long as structural racism exists, there will be generations of young people of colour who do not start their lives with the same equality of opportunity as their white peers. And for as long as that continues, untapped potential will never get to be realised.’

Asked for her thoughts on the BLM movement, Meghan acknowledged that it was a ‘different movement’ in the US from the one that in the UK.

‘The impetus is from a place of recognising equality and if you just go back to its ground level, I don’t think there’s anything controversial about it,’ she said. 

‘What has been inflammatory for a lot of people is when any version of the community becomes disruptive.

‘But when it’s just peaceful protest and when there’s the intention of just wanting unity and wanting recognition of equality, then that’s a beautiful thing

‘While it has been challenging for a lot of people certainly having to make this reckoning of historical significance that has got people to the place that they are, that is uncomfortable for people and we recognize that. It’s uncomfortable for us.’

She added: ‘If we just focus on the uplift and the positivity while still acknowledging the past, that’s how we reshape things and that shouldn’t be inflammatory at all, that should be really exciting.’