Meghan Markle Says Los Angeles Felt 'Segregated' but Was Full of Culture

Meghan Markle says Los Angeles was full of culture when she grew up, "despite how segregated it sometimes felt."

The Duchess of Sussex discussed the city's multicultural heritage during the latest episode of her Archetypes podcast, in which she interviewed comedian Margaret Cho.

Meghan said: "Growing up in Los Angeles, these are the types of foods I would eat: tamales, ghormeh sabzi, larb, matzo ball soup, adobo along with your usual kid fair of chicken nuggets and fries, and burgers and pizza.

"And the types of languages I would hear? Honestly, more than you can imagine.
From Armenian to Farsi, Korean, Spanish, Hebrew. Los Angeles, despite how segregated it sometimes felt, was full of culture that you could see, feel, hear and taste on a daily basis. The multitude of Asian cultures was a huge part of that."

The pair also discussed the police beating of Rodney King in 1992 and the racial tensions in Los Angeles surrounding the incident.

Cho described how her show All-American Girl came out in 1994, two years after King's beating sparked the L.A. riots. Korean business owners were seen with guns attempting to prevent vandalism and looting.

Meghan said: "Now that was a little more than two years after the L.A. riots, that time period in the spring of 1992 when my hometown of Los Angeles erupted into violence and civil unrest after the acquittal of the four officers charged with excessive force in the arrest and beating of Rodney King.

"Now, this was a really tense time for race relations in L.A. with the black community, the white community, the Latino community, and the Asian community and specifically in that a lot of Korean mom-and-pop shops were targeted during this time.

"And a lot of the shop owners, as Margaret was just referencing, took protecting their stores into their own hands."

Cho said: "So the Korean community were so paranoid about their perception because they had never been shown on the news. They'd never seen themselves on the news or seen themselves in American culture at all, and then suddenly there was this image of them in this sort of very violent context that they were really uncomfortable with.

"So, when my show came out, it was really hard for the Korean community as they just also didn't necessarily approve of me because I was not college educated," she said.

Fifty people died during the L.A. riots, which also caused around $1 billion dollars in damage, nearly half of which was to Korean businesses, CNN reported.

Chang Lee lived through the violence and told CNN in 2017 that he believed the police had abandoned the Korean community in order to protect richer parts of L.A.

He said: "I truly thought I was a part of mainstream society. Nothing in my life indicated I was a secondary citizen until the LA riots. The LAPD powers that be decided to protect the 'haves' and the Korean community did not have any political voice or power. They left us to burn."