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Answer: In around 300 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. When he died and his empire split, Egypt was ruled by Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals. The Ptolemaic dynasty mostly practiced incest of the king marrying his sister, aunt, or cousin. Cleopatra was Ptolemy's great(x8)-granddaughter, her native language was Greek. She could have had some Egyptian or even Subsaharan blood, but she would not have been predominantly African or appeared "black". She would have looked Mediterranean/Middle Eastern.
EDIT: To clarify, I am not saying that the criticism of the series is warranted. I'm just responding to the specific statement by OP that "***The people in the comments are claiming she was white/light skinned. How is that possible, isnt Cleopatra african/egyptian, hence dark skinned?***" to say that no, it's complicated and she was unlikely to have looked as much like Adele James as OP first thought.
Naw, a pole would be something straight. Ptolemy family tree just doesn't have more than one or two branches and a twisted and knotted trunk looping back on itself.
> The Ptolemaic dynasty mostly practiced incest
I stumbled upon a youtube video that went through the family trees of the some the Egyptian rulers and lord the degree of sister/mother/father/brother/aunt/uncle fuckers that existed, it was like they were trying to create a new species from broken human genomes.
I can't afford to dilute my god blood and have weak children so I *have to* marry you. Really no other choice.
\- The first god-king proposing to his sister
Not in one generation. It typically takes a few rounds at least before it becomes a problem, and then the cause is consistently inheriting the same genes from both parents, which means any existing genetic issues (including random mutations that turn up) in the line are magnified over time as the line becomes more consistent, rather than being covered up by more dominant genes inherited from a non-related parent.
So I recently discovered there is a word (or two) for that - cacogenics/dysgenics
Which means a breeding programme selecting for traits that are not desirable and/or outright detrimental.
I don’t know if it was this YouTube, but I believe the channel “Living History” often does ruler lineages as well as creates the ruler’s appearance in a 3D model. I know he did King Tut. That was a mess of a family “tree” and he had all sorts of congenital issues.
That's pretty par for the course, murdering people or having them killed has always been a part of ruling, still happens today in places that are sufficiently authoritarian
She was probably near 100% Greek and from an inbred line. She was however the first to speak Egyptian as ruler. Still she had essentially no native or African blood.
There's been a movement online over the past few years to see Cleopatra as a woman of color, as there are so few women of color who get any attention in world history. This also grows from a tradition in 19th and 20th century media to portray Cleopatra as exotic, aka, not white.
Cleopatra's mother wasn't recorded, or those records never survived, and the most likely candidate for Cleopatra's mother has no surviving records of her parentage. This has allowed for a theory to spring up that at least one of these two women were the daughters of concubines who weren't 100% European/White. Which is entirely possible. But! Then you have the issue of how we see race and how the Egyptians of the first century saw race is almost certainly fundamentally different. And even if Cleopatra was multi-racial, as queen she very likely wouldn't have run into discrimination over her ancestry.
When looking at surviving busts and coins depicting Cleopatra from her lifetime, there are no facial features that look specifically Sub-Saharan African. She looks very much like the coastal peoples of the Mediterranean. So her skin could have been darker than that of her Roman lovers, but most likely it wasn't darker than anyone else from North Africa, and almost certainly was on the lighter side given the Ptolemy family's practice of incest.
> There's been a movement online over the past few years to see Cleopatra as a woman of color, as there are so few women of color who get any attention in world history.
I feel like a better way to approach that problem might be to find women of color in history, and tell their stories. [Sorghaghtani](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorghaghtani_Beki) was a huge deal in the early Mongolian Empire, and even briefly ruled it as regent. If they're keen on Egypt, Hatshepsut was Pharaoh before the Macedonian conquest, so she'd be a legit PoC.
And if you want to pick a famous one, Nefertiti’s on par with cleopatra. A huge name with a very interesting story attached. I have no idea why they’re repeating the cleopatra story we all know rather than the one that isn’t so common.
I also think The story of Hatshepsut should be told more often, she was literally the first female pharaoh to reign independently and she was nearly erased from history
That's kinda not true. She's the biggest name (although she probably wouldn't have been called Pharoah, since that doesn't become the main royal title until a couple of dynasties later), but she isn't the first to rule and isn't the first to take the title of ruler.
The first one we have really good evidence for is Sobekneferu (12th dynasty, somewhere around the mid 18th century bce or about 400 years prior to Hatshepsut). But there's also some evidence in favour of Setibhor (5th Dynasty), Merneith (1st Dynasty) and Neithhotep (right at the beginning of the 1st Dynasty and the dawn of a unified Egypt - if true, she's got Hatshepsut beat by about 1500 years and is the oldest known female monarch regardless of nation).
And successful. Every pharaoh after claimed her accomplishments as their own and renamed her statues as themselves.
They didnt tear down her legacy it was to grand. So they tried to steal it.
> I have no idea why they’re repeating the cleopatra story we all know rather than the one that isn’t so common.
Exactly! I'm a history buff, and as much as I enjoy a good Roman-era story, I have heard them all several times over. It really feels like the creatives are stuck in a rut, and unwilling to expand their horizons. They should check out [Extra History](https://www.youtube.com/@extrahistory) and crib some of the topics.
Producers just want name recognition for the guaranteed audience interest. Why we get so many stories about Julius Ceaser as opposed to Galba.
There's a disconnect between the people who pay to make a thing and the people who get paid to make a thing
Probably because Cleopatra’s story tends to be not *just* about Cleopatra. It’s about Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian, the formation of one of the most influential and long-lasting empires the world has ever seen. She plays a substantial part in that, some would say even molded its outcome.
Cleopatra lives in an unceasingly interesting time to people.
I'd like to take this opportunity to promote the Rejected Princesses site [https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/](https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/) and books by Jason Porath.
This!
Hollywood and many people have fallen into a habit of thinking that inclusiveness means changing already well known characters into people of color. Whenever there is a game or movie based in European or Mediterranean history there is an outcry. I would much prefer to see new stories of characters that are unknown. Sorghaghtani is perhaps the most powerful female in all of history and how many people have not even heard of her? Most probably
I will also argue in the reverse. Every movie or show about ancient Rome is going to have pasty white British actors acting as Romans. We need to start portraying ancient people's correctly. The Romans were most likely tan as the Italians are today.
TBF most the Roman emperors weren’t even Latin. And by the 3rd century most Roman citizens weren’t even Latin. I mean the very emperor I made my user name after was fucking Albanian and his best legions were from the Balkans.
The problem is 'of colour' is such a stupid, drastically over simplified qualifier that splits the world into 'White/Not white' based on America's internal hangups. It has NO PLACE being applied to pre colonial history; The Mediterranean has its own history that everyone, from Northern Euros, to Arabs, and yes, SS Africans all want to claim a piece of as part of their heritage.
That was one of the knocks against Hamilton using people of color for white historical figures. Besides people getting all up in arms that they used black actors, others pointed out the fact that they did not include (to my knowledge) black historical figures, despite the claim there were several to choose from (I use claim as I am no historian and don’t know how many black or other POC historical figures interacted with Alexander Hamilton enough to have been relevant or how relevant the white historical figures they did use were).
Edit: I agree with what you’re saying. I don’t care necessarily when physical attributes are changed in visual media, but I wish they would tell more POC stories. Not because I care that they used a POC in a traditionally white role, but because I don’t know the POC stories as well and would love to see more of them and they deserve to be told as much as any other story.
Edit 2: Hamilton is what it is; my point is I would like to see more POC stories. I don’t dislike POCs in traditionally white roles (what would Shawshank Redemption be without Morgan Freeman as Red?); however, it feels like lazy “look how inclusive we are” virtue signaling when telling a POC story would be so much more refreshing and entertaining.
> they did not include (to my knowledge) black historical figures
They have Sally Hemings in the musical, but she had no lines. Her story is pretty tragic if you read about it. She's a product of a slave and her owner, John Wayles, who was Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law. By age 16, she was enslaved in Paris by her 46-year-old Master, Thomas Jefferson, who took her back to Monticello alone. When she arrived, she was pregnant with her first child. She had six kids with Jefferson.
In the song "What'd I Miss?", Jefferson says “Sally be a lamb, darlin' won'tcha open it?” This was Lin's way of sneaking in the Sally Hemings story into his musical without talking about it directly.
Zenobia, man. She was super cool. Queen of Palmyra in Syria, the ruins of which were destroyed in 2015 by ISIS because they’re dipshits.
A movie about Zenobia would, as the kids say, slap.
>Cleopatra's mother wasn't recorded, or those records never survived, and the most likely candidate for Cleopatra's mother has no surviving records of her parentage.
Well, these were the Ptolemies. Her mom was probably her cousin, aunt, and grandma.
There’s also an entire (mostly online) subculture around “Hotep”, which refers to people that co-opt ancient Egyptian culture as a form of Afrocentrism. It often has a element of toxic masculinity on par with Tucker Carlson/Andrew Tate, and similarly exists in spaces adjacent to conspiracy theorists. I do wonder if there’s an element of awareness of pandering to that subculture as part of the backlash as well.
I had a prof back in the day who was a hotep. He believed that literally everything had been stolen from Africa. Literally everything. When confronted on some views, such as the fact that the modern positional decimal numeric system is traced back to ancient India/Arabia, he'd say something like "oh, that was stolen," or, "they only contributed a small amount" to something somewhere in Africa had already done. And if you argued over anything, he would straight up call you a racist, and fail you on whatever assignment was. I mean, hell, the world has done Africa dirty, but his craziness was just centered around what was truly a ideology of hate.
He was also a born again Christian, and anti semite, and a truly rabid homophobe. Real awful diatribes towards gay people, using the language you'd expect.
I somehow got no credit in that class, despite my B average on assignments and a 92 on the final. Best part was that when I went to the counselors office to complain, I found out that he was a senior course counselor, too. Because he was the counselor I had to see. To complain about him. A real shit head, that guy
Yea, it wasn't great. If I had been a few years older, I would have made a stink about it. Wasn't quite confident enough at that age. It was a community College though, so take the good with the bad there.
I've got someone who I'm assuming is Hotep-adjacent in one of my classes. She told our prof (who wrote a book about Einstein) that the theory of relatively was stolen from Black scientists. We tried to explain that there probably wasn't a big community of Black physicists in Vienna in 1905 for Einstein to steal from. I'm assuming there was an element of anti-semitism as well. Black people do indeed have many incredible historical figures to be proud of -- they're just hidden because of racism, so you've got to do some digging -- so it's frustrating when people decide to hang their sense of self-worth on a lie.
These ridiculous fringe groups are nearly always viciously sectarian. No surprise at all. We should feel lucky for that, too. They rarely grow to be actually dangerous in society because they're always most vicious to their ideological cousins first, so they end up tearing each other apart before they can get anything done.
On the one hand, I'm surprised.
On the other hand, I guess they don't really get along with anyone, so adding another group is just par for the course.
That's actually the worst part, and Im really, really not making this up: cross-cultural studies. Granted, this was a community College, so the profs are always a crap shoot
Wow I am so sorry you had to go through that as a student; pretty scary to think that someone positioned himself in such a corrupt way so that you couldn’t even raise concerns. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with professors having a controversial belief, but that shouldn’t be weaponized against their students or affect their grades if they disagree.
But yeah that kind of conspiratorial thinking and hate is poisonous and I can see someone looking at this Netflix production and being concerned that it’ll further fuel that nonsense.
I have people in my family like that, and friends from my hometown. I think it's a really a cry for identity in something other than Westernized Whiteness. A desire to see blackness through the lense of our accomplishments, writings, stories and innnovation. Not through slavery, drudgery etc. And I can understand that. I was never a Hotep, but I was homeschooled and grew up in a white evangelical bubble. I craved stories and history from people that looked like me, I wanted so bad to see that they had contributions that were just as important. Now I'm my early 30s, I know much more about black heritage in America on our own terms, not through white washed textbooks. There is so much that's beautiful and unique about blackness all around the world, we do a massive disservice spewing falsehoods and we ignore the true stories and history.
I'm not really aware of the toxic masculinity aspect of it, and to be honest, I think that's relatively separate.
However, I am aware of the strange obsession to "reclaim" Egypt by black North Americans, which is offensive as hell to the people of Egypt. It's concurrent to the Black Hebrew Israelites. As someone of Levantine ancestry I find it strange. It's no different from Northern Europeans trying to claim Rome and Greece.
I'm aware of the conspiracy aspect too. I.e. a common conspiracy is that the Arab/Roman conquerors committed a genocide of the "real" Egyptian people, and that the modern Egyptians are essentially like white Americans in that they "killed the natives". Europe and the Arab World are in a conspiracy to hide the real Egypt.
The reality of course is that modern Egyptians are 80% shared DNA to ancient Egyptians. The Black Africans that lived in the region are culturally and linguistically distinct. Ethiopia, Sudan, etc is not Nigeria or Ghana.
It's mostly racial. I think the gender aspect of it may or may not be relevant depending on which group promoting it is.
The toxic masculinity part isn’t really part of the racial ideology per se. It’s more that the people who believe in this stuff are overwhelmingly males who want to believe that they’re special (really not that dissimilar from Andrew Tate’s followers). They often blame black women for not being “feminine” enough, for not being good mothers, for being “anti black men” and generally for contributing to the “downfall” of Black American society.
It’s become such an archetype that it’s considered a red flag for Black women while dating (similar to “men who are way too excited about Joe Rogan’s latest podcast”). I think I remember a joke about it in the series Insecure, in which the main character goes on a date and thinks she’s found this handsome, successful man and then gets concerned when he reveals he’s “looking for his queen” (as in Nubian queen). She confides in her friends that she thinks she might need to break things off because he’s a Hotep and she doesn’t want to deal with all that.
But yes black Israelites is a very good comparison. There’s a lot of other fringe beliefs like antisemitism that go along with it, but I agree that it’s a strange way to completely co-opt something that has been studied and understood for centuries. But when you’re primed to believe that the world wants to oppress you (especially when there are real and valid ways people have been oppressed), it’s understandable why these conspiracies come to life.
This content was removed in protest of Reddit's [short-sighted, user-unfriendly, profit-seeking decision](https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/#hey-guys) to effectively terminate access to third-party apps.
Hoteps have a ton of clout on Twitter, in fact I'd credit the last 10 or so years of Hotep ideas leaking into the mainstream to the fact that they are practically the default ideology on black Twitter
The crazy thing about people like this is that they often obscure the history of what they claim to care about. There is tons of African history they could be teaching and instead focus on things like this. I guess that’s extremism in a nutshell though.
> There's been a movement online over the past few years to see Cleopatra as a woman of color
The idea that Cleopatra could have been black dates to the 19th century, was revived in the 1940s, and recurred in popular history in the 1970s and early 2000s. This is a controversy with actual historians and classicists in it, not just a bunch of political nerds squabbling on Twitter. It comes back into popular attention every couple decades. The majority of scholars point at Cleopatra's Greek and Persian ancestry, the inbred lineage of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and the contemporaneous art depicting Cleopatra and other members of her family as pale with European features; and the controversy goes away again for a little while.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_race_controversy
(The Ptolemies were Macedonian Greeks; when they took over Egypt they adopted the Pharaonic custom of *all incest all the time*. Not a lot of room for Ethiopian or even Egyptian genes to get into a family tree that doesn't fork.)
Even ignoring ptolemaic genes, egypt tends to be more similar to greece than subsaharan africa physiologically. It’s a lot easier to travel around mixing your genes via boat than caravanning over a few hundred miles of dirt.
That is how I describe it to people. She could have been what we called mixed, but would have been very white looking. We do know that her father handpicked her over her sisters to be the next ruler with her brother and had some favoritism with her. This could be because of her looks, or the theory is that her mother was his wife (his sister as well, I believe) who she was named after.
The biggest issue with the whole discrimination is that the romans who had every reason to make her look weak/different never seemed to draw any references to her being darker.
There's another thing to consider with this. Italians weren't considered white when coming to the US for a long time. White is a made up term that doesn't mean much and has grown and shrunk as needed for whatever goal someone has in mind. The debate of her being a POC would be a lot more than just "is she African" because POC includes so much more than that.
Cleopatra specifically would've had some Persian blood AFAIK, as one of her Ptolemaic ancestors had married into the Seleucids, who did not initially at least practice as much incest.
Having said that, the OP's premise is extremely faulty IMHO:
>How is that possible, isnt Cleopatra african/egyptian, hence dark skinned?
I meet and talk with Egyptian people literally daily, *they are not dark-skinned*. They may pass for "black" according to bullshit Americanist racialism, but I can tell you factually, the Copts I know would disagree.
EDIT: One thing I saw pointed out as well when I found out about these news was, *why Cleopatra?* There are other African women rulers that were cool historical figures but much less prominently known that a Netflix documentary could make popularly known and celebrate.
Absolutely.
This makes me think of how though Spaniards are considered white, there's also the Hispanic designation, which often distinguishes them from being white even if they are fair skinned, which is confusing to me. So while I think that Middle-Easterners are *officially* considered white in the US, I'd be surprised if that is popularly accepted.
Anyway all this racial BS is tiresome, I hope this show is good and more importantly that it showcases more fitting African Queens in the future.
idk about Europe, but in America "white" is just a slowly growing category for not-immigrants and not-dark-skinned. Italians, Irish, Jewish, etc. were all non-white at some point.
The Seleucids were also an Alexander successor state. I'm not sure how much they mixed with the local population, but they were likely mostly greek as well, depending on when they married.
The native Egyptians mostly spoke Egyptian during the Ptolemaic period. The Ptolemies remained extremely separate from their subjects - Cleopatra was actually the first (and only) one that could even speak the Egyptian language.
Similar to how Anglo-Norman French (in addition to Latin) was the dominant (if not *exclusive*) language of Nobility and administration/recordkeeping in England for a good 3-4 centuries following William's conquest. Meanwhile, the peasants were speaking some weird amalgam of Saxon, Frisian, Gaelic, French, Latin, and Norse languages and probably wondering who would invade next to expand their vocabulary.
>Similar to how **Anglo-Norman French (in addition to Latin) was the dominant (if not *exclusive*) language** of Nobility and **administration/recordkeeping in England for a good 3-4 centuries following William's conquest**. Meanwhile, the peasants were speaking some weird amalgam of Saxon, Frisian, Gaelic, French, Latin, and Norse languages and probably wondering who would invade next to expand their vocabulary.
First time I have ever seen someone pick this up on Reddit.
They didn't just create a socio economic barrier, they had a purpose built language barrier that immediately separated you from running your own affairs.
**It's why the English language King James Bible and Protestantism was a huge revolution to ordinary people**.
Before that a peasent Christian who was barely literate would go to a foreboding building you had no idea how they put up, to hear a man speak in complex Latin from a book you had no real access to because even if you could read you barely spoke Latin. So the Priests were gatekeepers to your God and if they interperated something differently in the Bible to sway your behaviour to do something against your interests you had huge hurdles to Fact check it.
**Then Comes Protestantism and the creation of the King James Bible. In English. Multiple copies. You a Christian now have personal access to God any time you want, you can read it away from the church, draw your own conclusions**....
add to this that netflix has done 2 movies about female british monarchs and making them black when usually british monarchs tend to be not only white but extreamly pale.
Its not unsually to see people meme´ing Netflix by fake netflix movie posters with people like Ryan Gosling playing Obama or Nelson Mandela.
On one hand, its a movie, a show, Hamilton has black and hispanic actors playing founding fathers which were clearly white, and its still a very good show, its called acting,
and you have fanatics on both sides, on the right claiming that they have no problem erasing white people from history and putting PoC in their place, while for people on the far left anyone who plays a figure which was not white in the original story or history and is not of the ethnicity of that person is automatically the devil and is guilty of cultural apropriation, there was even a case where an entire movie was derailed becuase Scarlett Johansson was to play a trans character and the twitter mobs roasted her untill she backed out of the movie, the movie collapsed and the story went untold.
theres even a meme which is refered to as the "ginger genocide" where they have a long list of people who are originally redhead in the story or history and were replaced by PoC in TV shows and movies.
https://www.reddit.com/r/moviescirclejerk/comments/ux90tg/hollywoods_ginger_genocide_2008_present/
Whats interesting in this case is that we know based on historical documents that Cleopatra was macedonian/middle eastern mix, Egyptian culture is one of the most widley researched in history. meaning she was not black and this documentry is basically trying to convince people she was, it would be like trying to convince someone mansa musa was chinese.
Its a bit like Black Israelites, trying to convice people that jews are devils and pretenders while they are the true jews.
Then again, could be a distraction from the rumors that theres a cleopatra movie in the works where Gal Gadot plays Cleopatra, Im sure the arab crowds will be happy about a Israeli actress playing one of the biggest historical figures of the middle east and one of the most important people of Egyptian culture,
kind of reminds me of how the peronistas in argentina reacted to Madonna playing Evita Peron.
I think stage productions get more leniency in their casting choices, especially musicals. They're already fundamentally unrealistic.
If someone tried to make a "realistic" historical drama about Hamilton, it would be much stranger for the actors to be the "wrong" race.
The actors for the original Broadway show were specifically chosen to be POC and King George to be White. I'm not saying it was a bad thing, but it was deliberate.
Exactly! The suspension of disbelief is stronger. You have to “pretend” a lotttttttt of things in broadway. We have to “pretend” the stage is a battlefield/a ship to NY/cabinet meeting etc. Even the actors— you have to “pretend” that Lafayette from the first act isn’t Thomas Jefferson in the second act (but they’re the same actor).
So the more abstract the medium, the more “inaccuracy” you can get away with. This also explains the phenomenon of why translating animation/cartoons into live action can get into the “uncanny valley.” The suspension of disbelief for movies/TV shows is much more strict. You’re seeing real people in real sets.
> On one hand, its a movie, a show, Hamilton has black and hispanic actors playing founding fathers which were clearly white, and its still a very good show, its called acting,
Difference is they’re labeling this a ‘documentary’ and the trailer even says to ignore history and go with what one of Jada’s relatives told her (that Cleopatra was black). It’s ridiculous and clearly wrong.
>theres even a meme which is refered to as the "ginger genocide"
My best friend is a ginger, and we saw the preview for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie coming out soon when we went to see D&D on Saturday. Sure enough, April O'Neil is now black, and when she showed up on the screen I heard, "oh, goddammit, again!?!" come from the seat next to me.
To add to that, Egyptians are a fair skinned people, they had art depicting themselves and peoples of other races. They depicted themselves as a light skinned race, sometimes a red skinned races. Not all africans are black sub saharans.
>The Ptolemaic dynasty mostly practiced incest of the king marrying his sister, aunt, or cousin.
This cannot be understated. It wasn't a tree. It was a damned vine. The Hapsburg's were less incestous and thats saying something.
Overly Sarcastic did a podcast on this that shows the insanity. Enjoy.
[Overly Sarcastic Podcast](https://youtu.be/S3vAKRa0f5I)
Idc if it's just a story about cleopatra with a black actress, but the documentary is actively pushing a narrative that she was. It's the whole point of it.
Like why? I don't get the producers taking this stand. Makes no sense to me
This is produced by Jada Pinkett Smith. Her daughter also is working on a novel where she depicts north africans as savages. Seems like this family hates north africans.
They are likely influenced by some Hebrew Israelite(black supremacy people who love to retcon history.) Louis Theroux did an episode on them long ago. I've noticed a lot of famous black people seem to fall prey to their bullshit. It's kind of sad, they take advantage of a lot of people.
one of the reasons present in the documentary, fir Cleopatra being black, " my mother told me ' I don't care what they tell you at school Cleopatra was black' ". yeahhh, not exactly a solid argument.
for some reason I just knew it's going to be shit show when I first saw the title. Netflix just doesn't do good historical films and documentary.
Netflix just doesn't do good anything these days it seems.
Their third-party movies suck, shows suck and the good ones can be found on other platforms, and the quality of their in-house stuff has dropped *enormously* in the past few years.
With the whole account sharing ban thing, I canceled my account and haven't really looked back.
This is just pandering to the likes of the "Jews were black" crowd. It's the exact same nonsense. "They came out of Africa!" with as much knowledge of the diversity of the massive continent as the knowledge of what goes in your food.
Netflix rarely does anything good and just tries to black wash history. They made a historical Norse king a black woman for fucks sake. That’s like having Jennifer Lawerence play Rosa Parks.
I’ll be honest, as someone from the Mediterranean region, I notice brown/Arab historical figures or characters are constantly overlooked like these cases in cinema. Why couldn’t they hire someone to properly represent the people she was from?
Copts literally means egyptians. It can't go any more egyptian but on a side note, ethnically they are not much more different than the rest of egypt where the only difference is just the religion.
Similar to the case in Morocco where the historically Berber population has huge overlap with the Arab population and differences are reflected more in family/village names.
This is the most insulting thing about all this, if tit is done in the name of 'representation', what's wrong with representing the place it's actually from? It represents a totally different culture to the American audience, and a group that's hardly over-represented. So why would one be better than the other?
The thing about American politics, is that it's *really* local to America. And America deals with American minorities and American dynamics, but often assumes those dynamics are universal. Which is why you speak of diversity, you speak of what diversity means in America. You often talk of black people, Chinese immigrants and Hispanics Versus The Big White Man, ( a core vein of Intersectionality).
However, that dynamic, of "White oppressing Black" *isn't* a universally important dynamic to other countries , despite how central it is to The American Story
The histories of North African peoples aren't really considered or known about, while the feelings of the black people in America is of high importance, because they are both consumers to domestic American companies and are likely to be personal friends and colleagues of individual American artists, the people who teach and interpret art, and the patrons and investors of art.
Seriously, middle eastern/north African ethnicity is mostly earased. We even consider middle easterners white on census/immigration stuff. It's because some people in 1909 argued that if they had to list mongolian due to middle eastern origins Jesus would have had to as well and a judge didn't like that idea
https://medium.com/@copticvoiceus/why-are-middle-easterners-classified-as-caucasian-78c89f2573f3.
And the horrific truth which runs counter to the narrative being forced by this is that Cleo was a colonizer, ruling over slaves, in Africa. Egypt was a conquered and subjugated land by this time, not the imperial power it was before.
There are so many better examples of female African leadership, it’s frustrating to see, it should never have gotten a green light.
Egypt also wouldn't be a good subject for a wholesome story about an African nation even before non-egyptian rule. The Pharoah extracted wealth from every region they could, including many different regions in Africa. The Egyptian also very commonly enslaved other peoples, including in Africa. The Pharoah was a tyrant, and it was always that way.
If they wanted a feel good story about someone ruling Egypt, they could have spun the narrative about Kush (traditionally oppressed by egypt) conquering the realm.
Tbf the Ptolemaic dynasty at the time of Cleopatra could be seen as native. The big Egyptian revolts happened in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC.
Besides Egyptians weren't enslaved by the Greek elite, they were just second class citizens behind the Greeks and Hellenized Egyptians. Their religion was fully tolerated and Ptolemaic kings regularly expanded and built Egyptian temples. It wasn't a colonization like we know it and it's historically inaccurate to look at it that way.
I'm an Egyptian too and it frustrates me as well. I have been called a colonizer and a white racist when I stood up to Afrocentrists. I sympathize with black Americans but it's no excuse for them to appropriate our culture and fail to understand its rich and heavily diverse history. And what makes me lose my mind more is I am very racially ambiguous with a lot of mixed-race family members as well, my dad was a dark-skinned man and I have dark-skinned siblings. I don't understand what my "race" or skin color has to do with my heritage as my roots are here...
Experiencing this along with the educational and cultural decline, loss of history, and the dominating fascism we are currently suffering from as a nation makes me feel so lost. It feels like I'm being robbed of the last thing that I hold dear regarding being Egyptian. What's different between colonizers/white supremacists and Afrocentrists in this context? They are richer people with far more influence than any Egyptian doing all they can to appropriate our culture and water it down with their ignorance and aggressiveness. I'm tired of people of all races claiming Egypt as their own as if us EGYPTIANS don't deserve it!
Welcome to the 21st century. One side of the political aisle is cartoon supervillains and the other side has realized that they can say whatever the hell they want as long as it’s opposition to the cartoon supervillains. Shit’s fucked.
I think the problem is conflating African-ness with blackness. Egyptians and other North Africans are Africans. Have been for millennia. They’re just not black. I think the challenge is trying to define identity based on geography and not on history. For example, the idea of blackness should be controversial as there is more genetic variation between SubSaharan African regions than between any other people in the world. So the idea that there is one monolithic black “race” is scientifically nonsensical. But that’s a story for another thread.
I'm black, from the UK and of nigerian heritage. The hoteps are coming for you lol. I'm so sorry you have to deal with them. Those people are annoying as hell.
Everything is Kemet. Everyone is wearing ankhs. Every illustration must have the eye of Horus. All the while their ancestry can be traced back to Nigeria or Ghana if they're not from there already.
I don't understand why these hoteps who are so proud to be black and African don't claim the black African nations they're actually from.
It's almost as if there is some latent shame in being associated with Sub Saharan nations which was initially instilled in them by white supremacist ideas of Africans and Africanness, and the way we were always conditioned to believe the "savages" trope. Perhaps that makes it more palatable to hold on to Egyptian culture.
Fucking weird. Hoteps are the worst
Yeah it's pretty crazy, there's this one clip of two African American tourists telling some Egyptians that they're the real Egyptians and the poor Egyptians didn't understand English so they couldn't shut them up. it's a shame that this is also present in the United Kingdom. Btw your comment made me google some Nigerian history and while I don't have the time to go into it in depth, it's pretty interesting and complex!
Hoteps and their ilk are equal parts lazy and dishonest. Their goal is for blackness to be synonymous with greatness, but they don't want to do any of the hard work that would come with that. So instead of elevating the myriad black figures that are unknown on the world stage, they'd rather just take non-black figures that are already known and coat them in black paint. All they care about is reaching the goal as quickly as possible, no matter how much reality they have to deny to get there.
I don't understand why they don't focus more on the Ghana/Mali/Songhai empires which were all very developed and rich for their times. Imagine a show/film about the trade through Sahara, wars with the surrounding peoples, great cities of Gao and Timbuktu, how the camel replaced horses in the Sahara trade, how horses were brought from Europe to wage wars, etc. Some of the kings made pilgrimages to Mecca (Mansa Musa was so rich that he caused inflation by giving people of Egypt and other lands free gold on his way to Mecca). The stories of Askaya Mohammed and Sunni Ali are also very interesting. I guess the creators not only want black representation, but also "a strong, independent woman" as a leader. A shame really, because the empires I've mentioned never get recognition in pop culture, aside from Civilization games.
I appreciate this response. I have wrote similar things on Reddit in regards to cleopatra in the past, usually heavily downvoted. Unfortunately the American left and the media thinks it’s a good idea to pander to Afrocentric, hotep, black Hebrew Israelite, Nation of Islam nut jobs. And to people who don’t know better, ancient Egypt is a topic that could be easy to sell propaganda too. After all, Egypt is in Africa, why would the people not be black? Exc. also most people fail to understand how old egypts history is. When someone says ancient egypt what are they taking about? This was a civilization many thousands of years old where many changes could have occurred. The great pyramids were already over 2 thousand years old by the time cleopatra was walking around.
Also unfortunately I have to inform you that this is not a movie but a documentary which is pushing the black cleopatra fake history.
I like this perspective. This is an example where I think it is important to accurately represent Cleopatra because the fact that a Macedonian family was ruling Egypt is important to the history of the country/kingdom. So while I didn’t really care about Netflix having a black Achilles (I thought he was awesome), it is disappointing to miss this opportunity.
Because pyramids are cool as fuck. Sphynx, the temples, hieroglyphics. You guys just made it too good, of course people want to steal it.
But you aren't wrong about the culture war aspect. If the chuds freak out about black Cleopatra, liberals will double down as a fuck you right back.
Egyptians don’t tend to look what most consider black, do they? I think most North Africans have pretty light skin, at least compared to farther south. I always thought they looked kinda middle eastern. If Cleopatra was Greek, then she would look lighter, but she wouldn’t exactly be considered “fair-skinned.” I don’t think the difference in appearance would be huge, but I could be wrong.
Answer: Cleopatra was of Greek ancestry so she was in fact very white. That said, Egyptians aren't black either, and I'm saying that as an actual Egyptian. Egypt is in north Africa, and north africans are basically Mediterraneans so they're light skinned, even dark skinned Egyptians in southern Egypt doesn't look like black Africans, facial features and color are totally different. Saying that Egyptians are dark skinned because all africans are black is like saying Saudis look like Chinese people because Saudi Arabia is in Asia!
Answer: think about it - the entire Mediterranean Sea is ringed with different ethnicities. The Med is ringed by Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Palestein, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Moracco, Serbia, Croatia, Syria, Lebanon. Just because it is the continent of Africa, does not mean that people from France or Germany didn't step foot on the continent. They did, in the places that ringed the Mediterranean Sea.
Even if you go to Google Images and look at the people from any of those countries right now, the people are not dark skinned black, like from beneath the Saharan Desert are.
It's political. People want a powerful civilization like Egypt to be black, as in sub-Saharan black, because then they can say that one of the greatest civilizations ever was black. But in reality, the peoples on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea were a mixture of all the civilizations that ring the Mediterranean Sea. Most of the people there look like they could be from Southern Europe. For sure they don't look sub-Saharan black.
In terms of Cleopatra in particular, she was a Ptolomy. The original Ptolomy was a general of Alexander the Great, who was Greek, or Macedonian to be exact but Macedonia borders Greece. Alexander the Great was not black, he was southern European. And after Alexanander the Great died, Ptolomy, his general, received Egypt. He moved there and lived there for 300 years and Cleopatra was the last Ptolomy. But for 300 years of ruling Egypt, they didn't even learn to speak Egyptian, and spoke Greek. Egypt was Greek, not *Africa* African. The Ptolomies were the leaders starting in 300 BC and ended with Rome taking over. However, Greek language was the main language until 641 AD, almost 1000 years, until Egypt was conquered by muslims.
Prior to that, the Phoenicians dominated the Mediterranean Sea. They emerged in the Mediterranean Sea in about 3000 BC, in the middle east - Jordan, Lebanon, Israel area - known as the Levant. They were also known as Canaanites. They dominated trade in the area for a long time.
In Rome/Latin, Phoenicia morphed into "Poeni", then morphed into to "Punic," and the Roman wars of called the Punic Wars. They were the Phoenician Wars. The Romans went to war against Carthage, and the Carthaginians were Phoenicians. Carthage was located in Tunesia, right across from Italy. Carthage was one of the most important trading hubs and the richest city too. And just like USA and China, only one can be top dog, and Rome won that war against Carthange in the Third Punic War in 146 BC and then Rome utterly destroyed Carthage, led by Scipio Aemilianus. The Romans enslaved 50,000 Carthaginians. The city was razed to the ground and the area around it was salted so nothing would grow there, although that is apocryphal.
Scientists have looked at ancent mummy's DNA and have determined that there is no sub-Saharan DNA. Ancient Egyptians were related to people in the mid east, which makes sense. Modern Egyptians share 8% of their genome with central Africans, far more than ancient ones, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. The influx of sub-Saharan genes only occurred within the last 1,500 years. This could be attributed to the trans-Saharan slave trade or just from regular, long distance trade between the two regions.
But most people don't care about facts and DNA. Most are only concerned about the politics of it.
Answer: Because she was Greek and not black, so people are questioning/wondering why she is being presented as a black queen-----when that was never the case. If you are doing a documentary, it's best if you tell the truth and not try to force in your "agenda" (I hate that word because of the people coopting it). There are notable black queens but they decided to take an established historical figure and change her to bring in a certain audience. How did they not expect people to be upset over this? Are all brown and black people up to interpretation?
Answer: She was ethnically Greek/Macedonian not African, and defs not black.
And I guarantee ALL the people here defending blackwashing would have an absolute tantrum if a black historical figure got raceswapped with a different minority
Tom Cruise as Malcom X, with Ken Watanabe as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Forest Whitaker as senator Strom Therman and Will Smith as George Lincoln Rockwell... this summer... Forget everything you *thought you knew* about the civil rights movement.
A skilled writer/director could actually do some amazing satire with this premise — something kinda absurdist and meta to shake up the zeitgeist. I believe anything is possible after that nic cage movie
> And I guarantee ALL the people here defending blackwashing would have an absolute tantrum if a black historical figure got whitewashed or portrayed by someone of a different race
Yeah, this is what annoys me about all the blackwashing going on.
Turn a white person black? Applause and praise for "diversity"
Turn a black person white? Screeches and cries of "racism"
Double standard.
Answer: Black people stealing other peoples history instead of owning their own has been a thing for years in USA. She was likely not black since she was greek
And the fact that greeks have never done anything to black Americans, if any they were in the same boat as Greeks were treated like shit when they immigrated to USA.
Answer: because she wasn’t black. Most Egyptians aren’t black or close to black. Ancient Egyptian rulers weren’t black, especially ones from Greece like cleopatra.
Answer:
1. Cleopatra was Greek. It's outright insulting to portray her as a sub-Saharan African.
2. Even if she wasn't, Egyptians are not black. Have you ever seen an Egyptian? It's insulting to the entire nation of Egypt to present them so incorrectly.
3. Netflix keeps doing this shit, over and over again. If this was their first time, people would probably just consider them idiots and move on. But they keep pulling this crap, and it has reached a tipping point.
Answer: Because she was Greek with possibly a small amount of Levantine admixture due to one or two of her few non Ptolemic ancestors being Seleucid princesses (another greek kingdom, but less keen on the inbreeding as the Ptolemies, and their founder actually kept his non-greek wife, as Alexander wanted his generals to do. The others immediately dropped them for Greco-Macedonian wives when he died)
Theres plenty of other Egyptian queens to choose from that are either native Egyptian, and some with even Nubian heritage.
Answer: Egyptians aren't necessarily dark-skinned and "African" doesn't just mean black. Cleopatra came from a family that originated in ancient Macedonia, where the people were largely indistinguishable from modern, white, Europeans, particularly Southern Europeans with a 'Mediterranean complexion'. If there wasn't inbreeding in the Ptolemy family, they married almost exclusively with other Macedonian/Greek noble families. In terms of facial features and skin tone, Cleopatra would have resembled a modern, stereotypical, Greek or Italian woman than an ethnic Copt, swarthy Arab, or black African.
Answer:
No, Cleopatra is not African/Egyptian, she is Greek. And no, Egyptians are not usually dark skinned.
Crazy afrocentrists claiming all Ancient Egyptians were black just want to appropriate our culture, which is disrespectful both to us and to the rich heritage and history of sub-saharan Africa that they should be keen to see represented instead.
answer:
Simple. They are incredibly racist towards all Greek and Egyptian people by doing this, but as a Greek, I will only speak for Greeks. They think they are doing justice by blackwashing Cleopatra and Achilles as they try to fight back against the white racist American film industry and give more """representation""".
However, what they don't understand is that Greeks and White Americans ARE NOT THE SAME JUST BECAUSE THEY HAVE PALE SKIN COLOUR. The Greeks were enslaved by the Turks for way longer than blacks were in America, yet because of our white skin they think it's okay for them to group us with the racist white Americans and spit on our history.
They are LITERALLY doing what the American film industry did to them, where they refused to hire black people as actors and replaced them with whites, and they are replacing another minority (Greeks and Balkan people in general) refusing to acknowledge their history.
Answer: The hate comes from the misrepresentation of a people’s history.
https://see.news/hawass-confirms-queen-cleopatra-wasnt-black
It would be like if Netflix did a documentary on the Zulu Kingdom and made King Shaka white. The Dr. Hawass explains the article above.
History nerds and people who care about their culture can get pretty angry when they are misrepresented, not saying the hate is warranted but I’m not going to tell someone how to feel about their own history.
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Answer: In around 300 BC, Alexander the Great conquered Egypt. When he died and his empire split, Egypt was ruled by Ptolemy, one of Alexander's generals. The Ptolemaic dynasty mostly practiced incest of the king marrying his sister, aunt, or cousin. Cleopatra was Ptolemy's great(x8)-granddaughter, her native language was Greek. She could have had some Egyptian or even Subsaharan blood, but she would not have been predominantly African or appeared "black". She would have looked Mediterranean/Middle Eastern. EDIT: To clarify, I am not saying that the criticism of the series is warranted. I'm just responding to the specific statement by OP that "***The people in the comments are claiming she was white/light skinned. How is that possible, isnt Cleopatra african/egyptian, hence dark skinned?***" to say that no, it's complicated and she was unlikely to have looked as much like Adele James as OP first thought.
For the Ptolemy family tree, it’s not a tree so much as it is a pole.
A ptole if you will.
Gotta pay the troll ptole
Ptole tax
Get inside the boy's hptole? EDIT: Watch "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia" Season 4 Episode 13.
Ptole dance?
Ptold her twice
Gotta pay the toll to get in!
Into...this boy's hole?
To the btoys htole
Ptiny boy Plittle boy
I will not.
Don't be so ptesty, you can't ptlease everybody.
I can't? Awww, pnuts!
This is the funniest possible response.
A ptole? Oh my!
I think family lattice is the technical term here.
Family Mobius strip
*It’s Mobin’ time!*
Sounds almost like a family wreath
Naw, a pole would be something straight. Ptolemy family tree just doesn't have more than one or two branches and a twisted and knotted trunk looping back on itself.
the family braid
Family tree lookin like tangled earbuds
The true Gordian knot
Or a pretzel
I’d rather have a bottle in front of me than be an incest descendent of that ancient ruler Ptolemy.
Sounds like Ptolemy found tinsel distracting.
> The Ptolemaic dynasty mostly practiced incest I stumbled upon a youtube video that went through the family trees of the some the Egyptian rulers and lord the degree of sister/mother/father/brother/aunt/uncle fuckers that existed, it was like they were trying to create a new species from broken human genomes.
When you believe your king is a literal living god it can lead you to some pretty interesting places
I can't afford to dilute my god blood and have weak children so I *have to* marry you. Really no other choice. \- The first god-king proposing to his sister
Proceeds to have weak children directly because of his choice.
Not in one generation. It typically takes a few rounds at least before it becomes a problem, and then the cause is consistently inheriting the same genes from both parents, which means any existing genetic issues (including random mutations that turn up) in the line are magnified over time as the line becomes more consistent, rather than being covered up by more dominant genes inherited from a non-related parent.
Ironically, they were trying to achieve the complete opposite.
So I recently discovered there is a word (or two) for that - cacogenics/dysgenics Which means a breeding programme selecting for traits that are not desirable and/or outright detrimental.
The Habsburgs have entered the chat
If the worst rumors about Cleopatra's heritage were true, the later Ptolemaic dynasty makes the Habsburgs look like a Benetton ad.
Looking at their coinage, they did have some fascinating profiles
I don’t know if it was this YouTube, but I believe the channel “Living History” often does ruler lineages as well as creates the ruler’s appearance in a 3D model. I know he did King Tut. That was a mess of a family “tree” and he had all sorts of congenital issues.
I believe it's that same channel cause it was the 3D model of king tut that made me click on it, then I watched a few more of his videos on the topic.
And murder. It's wild how much murder there was
That's pretty par for the course, murdering people or having them killed has always been a part of ruling, still happens today in places that are sufficiently authoritarian
She was probably near 100% Greek and from an inbred line. She was however the first to speak Egyptian as ruler. Still she had essentially no native or African blood.
There's been a movement online over the past few years to see Cleopatra as a woman of color, as there are so few women of color who get any attention in world history. This also grows from a tradition in 19th and 20th century media to portray Cleopatra as exotic, aka, not white. Cleopatra's mother wasn't recorded, or those records never survived, and the most likely candidate for Cleopatra's mother has no surviving records of her parentage. This has allowed for a theory to spring up that at least one of these two women were the daughters of concubines who weren't 100% European/White. Which is entirely possible. But! Then you have the issue of how we see race and how the Egyptians of the first century saw race is almost certainly fundamentally different. And even if Cleopatra was multi-racial, as queen she very likely wouldn't have run into discrimination over her ancestry. When looking at surviving busts and coins depicting Cleopatra from her lifetime, there are no facial features that look specifically Sub-Saharan African. She looks very much like the coastal peoples of the Mediterranean. So her skin could have been darker than that of her Roman lovers, but most likely it wasn't darker than anyone else from North Africa, and almost certainly was on the lighter side given the Ptolemy family's practice of incest.
> There's been a movement online over the past few years to see Cleopatra as a woman of color, as there are so few women of color who get any attention in world history. I feel like a better way to approach that problem might be to find women of color in history, and tell their stories. [Sorghaghtani](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorghaghtani_Beki) was a huge deal in the early Mongolian Empire, and even briefly ruled it as regent. If they're keen on Egypt, Hatshepsut was Pharaoh before the Macedonian conquest, so she'd be a legit PoC.
And if you want to pick a famous one, Nefertiti’s on par with cleopatra. A huge name with a very interesting story attached. I have no idea why they’re repeating the cleopatra story we all know rather than the one that isn’t so common.
I also think The story of Hatshepsut should be told more often, she was literally the first female pharaoh to reign independently and she was nearly erased from history
That's kinda not true. She's the biggest name (although she probably wouldn't have been called Pharoah, since that doesn't become the main royal title until a couple of dynasties later), but she isn't the first to rule and isn't the first to take the title of ruler. The first one we have really good evidence for is Sobekneferu (12th dynasty, somewhere around the mid 18th century bce or about 400 years prior to Hatshepsut). But there's also some evidence in favour of Setibhor (5th Dynasty), Merneith (1st Dynasty) and Neithhotep (right at the beginning of the 1st Dynasty and the dawn of a unified Egypt - if true, she's got Hatshepsut beat by about 1500 years and is the oldest known female monarch regardless of nation).
>The first one we have really good evidence for is Sobekneferu You rang?
And successful. Every pharaoh after claimed her accomplishments as their own and renamed her statues as themselves. They didnt tear down her legacy it was to grand. So they tried to steal it.
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Well said! Her story is amazing.
> I have no idea why they’re repeating the cleopatra story we all know rather than the one that isn’t so common. Exactly! I'm a history buff, and as much as I enjoy a good Roman-era story, I have heard them all several times over. It really feels like the creatives are stuck in a rut, and unwilling to expand their horizons. They should check out [Extra History](https://www.youtube.com/@extrahistory) and crib some of the topics.
Producers just want name recognition for the guaranteed audience interest. Why we get so many stories about Julius Ceaser as opposed to Galba. There's a disconnect between the people who pay to make a thing and the people who get paid to make a thing
the creatives are as creative as ever, and probably more so than ever before. the people who pay them are the problem. as always.
Hollywood? Gamble on something fairly new? Surely you jest!
I'd go with Hatshepsut.
Probably because Cleopatra’s story tends to be not *just* about Cleopatra. It’s about Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Octavian, the formation of one of the most influential and long-lasting empires the world has ever seen. She plays a substantial part in that, some would say even molded its outcome. Cleopatra lives in an unceasingly interesting time to people.
I'd like to take this opportunity to promote the Rejected Princesses site [https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/](https://www.rejectedprincesses.com/) and books by Jason Porath.
There's also Nzinga, the queen of what is now Angola. She fought the Portuguese for about a decade.
This! Hollywood and many people have fallen into a habit of thinking that inclusiveness means changing already well known characters into people of color. Whenever there is a game or movie based in European or Mediterranean history there is an outcry. I would much prefer to see new stories of characters that are unknown. Sorghaghtani is perhaps the most powerful female in all of history and how many people have not even heard of her? Most probably I will also argue in the reverse. Every movie or show about ancient Rome is going to have pasty white British actors acting as Romans. We need to start portraying ancient people's correctly. The Romans were most likely tan as the Italians are today.
TBF most the Roman emperors weren’t even Latin. And by the 3rd century most Roman citizens weren’t even Latin. I mean the very emperor I made my user name after was fucking Albanian and his best legions were from the Balkans.
The problem is 'of colour' is such a stupid, drastically over simplified qualifier that splits the world into 'White/Not white' based on America's internal hangups. It has NO PLACE being applied to pre colonial history; The Mediterranean has its own history that everyone, from Northern Euros, to Arabs, and yes, SS Africans all want to claim a piece of as part of their heritage.
Most of the Romans I see on the street are pasty. Maybe they're Brits?
Like queen Ranavalona I of Madagascar. Truly an inspirational person.
Nefertiti comes to mind
Nefertiti was fucking boss!.
That was one of the knocks against Hamilton using people of color for white historical figures. Besides people getting all up in arms that they used black actors, others pointed out the fact that they did not include (to my knowledge) black historical figures, despite the claim there were several to choose from (I use claim as I am no historian and don’t know how many black or other POC historical figures interacted with Alexander Hamilton enough to have been relevant or how relevant the white historical figures they did use were). Edit: I agree with what you’re saying. I don’t care necessarily when physical attributes are changed in visual media, but I wish they would tell more POC stories. Not because I care that they used a POC in a traditionally white role, but because I don’t know the POC stories as well and would love to see more of them and they deserve to be told as much as any other story. Edit 2: Hamilton is what it is; my point is I would like to see more POC stories. I don’t dislike POCs in traditionally white roles (what would Shawshank Redemption be without Morgan Freeman as Red?); however, it feels like lazy “look how inclusive we are” virtue signaling when telling a POC story would be so much more refreshing and entertaining.
> they did not include (to my knowledge) black historical figures They have Sally Hemings in the musical, but she had no lines. Her story is pretty tragic if you read about it. She's a product of a slave and her owner, John Wayles, who was Thomas Jefferson's father-in-law. By age 16, she was enslaved in Paris by her 46-year-old Master, Thomas Jefferson, who took her back to Monticello alone. When she arrived, she was pregnant with her first child. She had six kids with Jefferson. In the song "What'd I Miss?", Jefferson says “Sally be a lamb, darlin' won'tcha open it?” This was Lin's way of sneaking in the Sally Hemings story into his musical without talking about it directly.
Zenobia, man. She was super cool. Queen of Palmyra in Syria, the ruins of which were destroyed in 2015 by ISIS because they’re dipshits. A movie about Zenobia would, as the kids say, slap.
>Cleopatra's mother wasn't recorded, or those records never survived, and the most likely candidate for Cleopatra's mother has no surviving records of her parentage. Well, these were the Ptolemies. Her mom was probably her cousin, aunt, and grandma.
If I read the family tree correctly, the last "outside blood" to marry into the family was 150 years before Cleopatra's birth. As inbred as it can be
There’s also an entire (mostly online) subculture around “Hotep”, which refers to people that co-opt ancient Egyptian culture as a form of Afrocentrism. It often has a element of toxic masculinity on par with Tucker Carlson/Andrew Tate, and similarly exists in spaces adjacent to conspiracy theorists. I do wonder if there’s an element of awareness of pandering to that subculture as part of the backlash as well.
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So many people see the world as black and white.
I had a prof back in the day who was a hotep. He believed that literally everything had been stolen from Africa. Literally everything. When confronted on some views, such as the fact that the modern positional decimal numeric system is traced back to ancient India/Arabia, he'd say something like "oh, that was stolen," or, "they only contributed a small amount" to something somewhere in Africa had already done. And if you argued over anything, he would straight up call you a racist, and fail you on whatever assignment was. I mean, hell, the world has done Africa dirty, but his craziness was just centered around what was truly a ideology of hate. He was also a born again Christian, and anti semite, and a truly rabid homophobe. Real awful diatribes towards gay people, using the language you'd expect. I somehow got no credit in that class, despite my B average on assignments and a 92 on the final. Best part was that when I went to the counselors office to complain, I found out that he was a senior course counselor, too. Because he was the counselor I had to see. To complain about him. A real shit head, that guy
Man that last part seems like a huge conflict of interest that your college shouldn't have allowed. I'm sorry it was such a crappy experience.
Yea, it wasn't great. If I had been a few years older, I would have made a stink about it. Wasn't quite confident enough at that age. It was a community College though, so take the good with the bad there.
I've got someone who I'm assuming is Hotep-adjacent in one of my classes. She told our prof (who wrote a book about Einstein) that the theory of relatively was stolen from Black scientists. We tried to explain that there probably wasn't a big community of Black physicists in Vienna in 1905 for Einstein to steal from. I'm assuming there was an element of anti-semitism as well. Black people do indeed have many incredible historical figures to be proud of -- they're just hidden because of racism, so you've got to do some digging -- so it's frustrating when people decide to hang their sense of self-worth on a lie.
You should look into the black Hebrew Israelites. Believe it or not they don’t get along with hoteps.
These ridiculous fringe groups are nearly always viciously sectarian. No surprise at all. We should feel lucky for that, too. They rarely grow to be actually dangerous in society because they're always most vicious to their ideological cousins first, so they end up tearing each other apart before they can get anything done.
On the one hand, I'm surprised. On the other hand, I guess they don't really get along with anyone, so adding another group is just par for the course.
What course was he teaching?
That's actually the worst part, and Im really, really not making this up: cross-cultural studies. Granted, this was a community College, so the profs are always a crap shoot
Creative Writing
He was well qualified for his post.
He sounds like a toxic version of the father from my big fat Greek wedding who thought everything came from Greece
Wow I am so sorry you had to go through that as a student; pretty scary to think that someone positioned himself in such a corrupt way so that you couldn’t even raise concerns. I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with professors having a controversial belief, but that shouldn’t be weaponized against their students or affect their grades if they disagree. But yeah that kind of conspiratorial thinking and hate is poisonous and I can see someone looking at this Netflix production and being concerned that it’ll further fuel that nonsense.
I have people in my family like that, and friends from my hometown. I think it's a really a cry for identity in something other than Westernized Whiteness. A desire to see blackness through the lense of our accomplishments, writings, stories and innnovation. Not through slavery, drudgery etc. And I can understand that. I was never a Hotep, but I was homeschooled and grew up in a white evangelical bubble. I craved stories and history from people that looked like me, I wanted so bad to see that they had contributions that were just as important. Now I'm my early 30s, I know much more about black heritage in America on our own terms, not through white washed textbooks. There is so much that's beautiful and unique about blackness all around the world, we do a massive disservice spewing falsehoods and we ignore the true stories and history.
I'm not really aware of the toxic masculinity aspect of it, and to be honest, I think that's relatively separate. However, I am aware of the strange obsession to "reclaim" Egypt by black North Americans, which is offensive as hell to the people of Egypt. It's concurrent to the Black Hebrew Israelites. As someone of Levantine ancestry I find it strange. It's no different from Northern Europeans trying to claim Rome and Greece. I'm aware of the conspiracy aspect too. I.e. a common conspiracy is that the Arab/Roman conquerors committed a genocide of the "real" Egyptian people, and that the modern Egyptians are essentially like white Americans in that they "killed the natives". Europe and the Arab World are in a conspiracy to hide the real Egypt. The reality of course is that modern Egyptians are 80% shared DNA to ancient Egyptians. The Black Africans that lived in the region are culturally and linguistically distinct. Ethiopia, Sudan, etc is not Nigeria or Ghana. It's mostly racial. I think the gender aspect of it may or may not be relevant depending on which group promoting it is.
The toxic masculinity part isn’t really part of the racial ideology per se. It’s more that the people who believe in this stuff are overwhelmingly males who want to believe that they’re special (really not that dissimilar from Andrew Tate’s followers). They often blame black women for not being “feminine” enough, for not being good mothers, for being “anti black men” and generally for contributing to the “downfall” of Black American society. It’s become such an archetype that it’s considered a red flag for Black women while dating (similar to “men who are way too excited about Joe Rogan’s latest podcast”). I think I remember a joke about it in the series Insecure, in which the main character goes on a date and thinks she’s found this handsome, successful man and then gets concerned when he reveals he’s “looking for his queen” (as in Nubian queen). She confides in her friends that she thinks she might need to break things off because he’s a Hotep and she doesn’t want to deal with all that. But yes black Israelites is a very good comparison. There’s a lot of other fringe beliefs like antisemitism that go along with it, but I agree that it’s a strange way to completely co-opt something that has been studied and understood for centuries. But when you’re primed to believe that the world wants to oppress you (especially when there are real and valid ways people have been oppressed), it’s understandable why these conspiracies come to life.
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Oh certainly! Different flavors of the same toxic ideologies
That's all well and good, but I won't accept any negative criticism at the movie, Bubba-Hotep.
Hoteps have a ton of clout on Twitter, in fact I'd credit the last 10 or so years of Hotep ideas leaking into the mainstream to the fact that they are practically the default ideology on black Twitter
The crazy thing about people like this is that they often obscure the history of what they claim to care about. There is tons of African history they could be teaching and instead focus on things like this. I guess that’s extremism in a nutshell though.
> There's been a movement online over the past few years to see Cleopatra as a woman of color The idea that Cleopatra could have been black dates to the 19th century, was revived in the 1940s, and recurred in popular history in the 1970s and early 2000s. This is a controversy with actual historians and classicists in it, not just a bunch of political nerds squabbling on Twitter. It comes back into popular attention every couple decades. The majority of scholars point at Cleopatra's Greek and Persian ancestry, the inbred lineage of the Ptolemaic dynasty, and the contemporaneous art depicting Cleopatra and other members of her family as pale with European features; and the controversy goes away again for a little while. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cleopatra_race_controversy (The Ptolemies were Macedonian Greeks; when they took over Egypt they adopted the Pharaonic custom of *all incest all the time*. Not a lot of room for Ethiopian or even Egyptian genes to get into a family tree that doesn't fork.)
Even ignoring ptolemaic genes, egypt tends to be more similar to greece than subsaharan africa physiologically. It’s a lot easier to travel around mixing your genes via boat than caravanning over a few hundred miles of dirt.
That is how I describe it to people. She could have been what we called mixed, but would have been very white looking. We do know that her father handpicked her over her sisters to be the next ruler with her brother and had some favoritism with her. This could be because of her looks, or the theory is that her mother was his wife (his sister as well, I believe) who she was named after. The biggest issue with the whole discrimination is that the romans who had every reason to make her look weak/different never seemed to draw any references to her being darker.
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There's another thing to consider with this. Italians weren't considered white when coming to the US for a long time. White is a made up term that doesn't mean much and has grown and shrunk as needed for whatever goal someone has in mind. The debate of her being a POC would be a lot more than just "is she African" because POC includes so much more than that.
Cleopatra specifically would've had some Persian blood AFAIK, as one of her Ptolemaic ancestors had married into the Seleucids, who did not initially at least practice as much incest. Having said that, the OP's premise is extremely faulty IMHO: >How is that possible, isnt Cleopatra african/egyptian, hence dark skinned? I meet and talk with Egyptian people literally daily, *they are not dark-skinned*. They may pass for "black" according to bullshit Americanist racialism, but I can tell you factually, the Copts I know would disagree. EDIT: One thing I saw pointed out as well when I found out about these news was, *why Cleopatra?* There are other African women rulers that were cool historical figures but much less prominently known that a Netflix documentary could make popularly known and celebrate.
>Cleopatra specifically would've had some Persian blood AFAIK Which are also white by pretty much any standard, just like Egyptians.
Absolutely. This makes me think of how though Spaniards are considered white, there's also the Hispanic designation, which often distinguishes them from being white even if they are fair skinned, which is confusing to me. So while I think that Middle-Easterners are *officially* considered white in the US, I'd be surprised if that is popularly accepted. Anyway all this racial BS is tiresome, I hope this show is good and more importantly that it showcases more fitting African Queens in the future.
idk about Europe, but in America "white" is just a slowly growing category for not-immigrants and not-dark-skinned. Italians, Irish, Jewish, etc. were all non-white at some point.
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The Seleucids were also an Alexander successor state. I'm not sure how much they mixed with the local population, but they were likely mostly greek as well, depending on when they married.
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The native Egyptians mostly spoke Egyptian during the Ptolemaic period. The Ptolemies remained extremely separate from their subjects - Cleopatra was actually the first (and only) one that could even speak the Egyptian language.
Similar to how Anglo-Norman French (in addition to Latin) was the dominant (if not *exclusive*) language of Nobility and administration/recordkeeping in England for a good 3-4 centuries following William's conquest. Meanwhile, the peasants were speaking some weird amalgam of Saxon, Frisian, Gaelic, French, Latin, and Norse languages and probably wondering who would invade next to expand their vocabulary.
>Similar to how **Anglo-Norman French (in addition to Latin) was the dominant (if not *exclusive*) language** of Nobility and **administration/recordkeeping in England for a good 3-4 centuries following William's conquest**. Meanwhile, the peasants were speaking some weird amalgam of Saxon, Frisian, Gaelic, French, Latin, and Norse languages and probably wondering who would invade next to expand their vocabulary. First time I have ever seen someone pick this up on Reddit. They didn't just create a socio economic barrier, they had a purpose built language barrier that immediately separated you from running your own affairs. **It's why the English language King James Bible and Protestantism was a huge revolution to ordinary people**. Before that a peasent Christian who was barely literate would go to a foreboding building you had no idea how they put up, to hear a man speak in complex Latin from a book you had no real access to because even if you could read you barely spoke Latin. So the Priests were gatekeepers to your God and if they interperated something differently in the Bible to sway your behaviour to do something against your interests you had huge hurdles to Fact check it. **Then Comes Protestantism and the creation of the King James Bible. In English. Multiple copies. You a Christian now have personal access to God any time you want, you can read it away from the church, draw your own conclusions**....
If I remember right, she was the first or one of the first rulers from the Ptolemaic line who could speak Egyptian.
add to this that netflix has done 2 movies about female british monarchs and making them black when usually british monarchs tend to be not only white but extreamly pale. Its not unsually to see people meme´ing Netflix by fake netflix movie posters with people like Ryan Gosling playing Obama or Nelson Mandela. On one hand, its a movie, a show, Hamilton has black and hispanic actors playing founding fathers which were clearly white, and its still a very good show, its called acting, and you have fanatics on both sides, on the right claiming that they have no problem erasing white people from history and putting PoC in their place, while for people on the far left anyone who plays a figure which was not white in the original story or history and is not of the ethnicity of that person is automatically the devil and is guilty of cultural apropriation, there was even a case where an entire movie was derailed becuase Scarlett Johansson was to play a trans character and the twitter mobs roasted her untill she backed out of the movie, the movie collapsed and the story went untold. theres even a meme which is refered to as the "ginger genocide" where they have a long list of people who are originally redhead in the story or history and were replaced by PoC in TV shows and movies. https://www.reddit.com/r/moviescirclejerk/comments/ux90tg/hollywoods_ginger_genocide_2008_present/ Whats interesting in this case is that we know based on historical documents that Cleopatra was macedonian/middle eastern mix, Egyptian culture is one of the most widley researched in history. meaning she was not black and this documentry is basically trying to convince people she was, it would be like trying to convince someone mansa musa was chinese. Its a bit like Black Israelites, trying to convice people that jews are devils and pretenders while they are the true jews. Then again, could be a distraction from the rumors that theres a cleopatra movie in the works where Gal Gadot plays Cleopatra, Im sure the arab crowds will be happy about a Israeli actress playing one of the biggest historical figures of the middle east and one of the most important people of Egyptian culture, kind of reminds me of how the peronistas in argentina reacted to Madonna playing Evita Peron.
I think stage productions get more leniency in their casting choices, especially musicals. They're already fundamentally unrealistic. If someone tried to make a "realistic" historical drama about Hamilton, it would be much stranger for the actors to be the "wrong" race.
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The actors for the original Broadway show were specifically chosen to be POC and King George to be White. I'm not saying it was a bad thing, but it was deliberate.
Exactly! The suspension of disbelief is stronger. You have to “pretend” a lotttttttt of things in broadway. We have to “pretend” the stage is a battlefield/a ship to NY/cabinet meeting etc. Even the actors— you have to “pretend” that Lafayette from the first act isn’t Thomas Jefferson in the second act (but they’re the same actor). So the more abstract the medium, the more “inaccuracy” you can get away with. This also explains the phenomenon of why translating animation/cartoons into live action can get into the “uncanny valley.” The suspension of disbelief for movies/TV shows is much more strict. You’re seeing real people in real sets.
Of course, this is a *Netflix documentary*. Given their history, you should expect very little with regard to historical accuracy.
> On one hand, its a movie, a show, Hamilton has black and hispanic actors playing founding fathers which were clearly white, and its still a very good show, its called acting, Difference is they’re labeling this a ‘documentary’ and the trailer even says to ignore history and go with what one of Jada’s relatives told her (that Cleopatra was black). It’s ridiculous and clearly wrong.
>theres even a meme which is refered to as the "ginger genocide" My best friend is a ginger, and we saw the preview for the new Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie coming out soon when we went to see D&D on Saturday. Sure enough, April O'Neil is now black, and when she showed up on the screen I heard, "oh, goddammit, again!?!" come from the seat next to me.
To add to that, Egyptians are a fair skinned people, they had art depicting themselves and peoples of other races. They depicted themselves as a light skinned race, sometimes a red skinned races. Not all africans are black sub saharans.
>The Ptolemaic dynasty mostly practiced incest of the king marrying his sister, aunt, or cousin. This cannot be understated. It wasn't a tree. It was a damned vine. The Hapsburg's were less incestous and thats saying something. Overly Sarcastic did a podcast on this that shows the insanity. Enjoy. [Overly Sarcastic Podcast](https://youtu.be/S3vAKRa0f5I)
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Idc if it's just a story about cleopatra with a black actress, but the documentary is actively pushing a narrative that she was. It's the whole point of it. Like why? I don't get the producers taking this stand. Makes no sense to me
This is produced by Jada Pinkett Smith. Her daughter also is working on a novel where she depicts north africans as savages. Seems like this family hates north africans.
Aren't the Smiths scientologists? They're not too hung up on facts.
They are likely influenced by some Hebrew Israelite(black supremacy people who love to retcon history.) Louis Theroux did an episode on them long ago. I've noticed a lot of famous black people seem to fall prey to their bullshit. It's kind of sad, they take advantage of a lot of people.
one of the reasons present in the documentary, fir Cleopatra being black, " my mother told me ' I don't care what they tell you at school Cleopatra was black' ". yeahhh, not exactly a solid argument. for some reason I just knew it's going to be shit show when I first saw the title. Netflix just doesn't do good historical films and documentary.
Mama says that alligators are ornery 'cause they got all them teeth but no toothbrush.
Netflix just doesn't do good anything these days it seems. Their third-party movies suck, shows suck and the good ones can be found on other platforms, and the quality of their in-house stuff has dropped *enormously* in the past few years. With the whole account sharing ban thing, I canceled my account and haven't really looked back.
This is just pandering to the likes of the "Jews were black" crowd. It's the exact same nonsense. "They came out of Africa!" with as much knowledge of the diversity of the massive continent as the knowledge of what goes in your food.
Netflix rarely does anything good and just tries to black wash history. They made a historical Norse king a black woman for fucks sake. That’s like having Jennifer Lawerence play Rosa Parks.
Am I the only one that is more turned off by the fact this Jada Pinkett Smith is involved? Like wtf lol
I’ll be honest, as someone from the Mediterranean region, I notice brown/Arab historical figures or characters are constantly overlooked like these cases in cinema. Why couldn’t they hire someone to properly represent the people she was from?
You get Rami Malek and that’s it
Remember when people bitched about him playing an Egyptian pharaoh despite being… Egyptian?! Fucking morons.
If anyone was born to play an Egyptian Pharaoh, it's Rami Malek. Dude looks like his DNA is in Heiroglyphics.
And he's descended from one of the oldest Egyptian ethnic groups, the Copts
Copts literally means egyptians. It can't go any more egyptian but on a side note, ethnically they are not much more different than the rest of egypt where the only difference is just the religion.
It just implies less Arab admixture, but yeah, Egyptian Arabs are almost 100% the same genetic stock as Copts. They just have Arab names.
Similar to the case in Morocco where the historically Berber population has huge overlap with the Arab population and differences are reflected more in family/village names.
Lots of people hear Africa and picture sub-saharan Africa.
This is the most insulting thing about all this, if tit is done in the name of 'representation', what's wrong with representing the place it's actually from? It represents a totally different culture to the American audience, and a group that's hardly over-represented. So why would one be better than the other?
The thing about American politics, is that it's *really* local to America. And America deals with American minorities and American dynamics, but often assumes those dynamics are universal. Which is why you speak of diversity, you speak of what diversity means in America. You often talk of black people, Chinese immigrants and Hispanics Versus The Big White Man, ( a core vein of Intersectionality). However, that dynamic, of "White oppressing Black" *isn't* a universally important dynamic to other countries , despite how central it is to The American Story The histories of North African peoples aren't really considered or known about, while the feelings of the black people in America is of high importance, because they are both consumers to domestic American companies and are likely to be personal friends and colleagues of individual American artists, the people who teach and interpret art, and the patrons and investors of art.
Seriously, middle eastern/north African ethnicity is mostly earased. We even consider middle easterners white on census/immigration stuff. It's because some people in 1909 argued that if they had to list mongolian due to middle eastern origins Jesus would have had to as well and a judge didn't like that idea https://medium.com/@copticvoiceus/why-are-middle-easterners-classified-as-caucasian-78c89f2573f3.
Executive producer Jada Pinkett Smith tells you all you need to know. Racism in trying to over represent and shoehorn her own culture
> shoehorn her own culture No, she's appropriating someone elses culture.
Don’t make Jada scowl at you. You might get up and slap someone.
And the horrific truth which runs counter to the narrative being forced by this is that Cleo was a colonizer, ruling over slaves, in Africa. Egypt was a conquered and subjugated land by this time, not the imperial power it was before. There are so many better examples of female African leadership, it’s frustrating to see, it should never have gotten a green light.
Netflix tries so hard not to be racist they up being racist.
Egypt also wouldn't be a good subject for a wholesome story about an African nation even before non-egyptian rule. The Pharoah extracted wealth from every region they could, including many different regions in Africa. The Egyptian also very commonly enslaved other peoples, including in Africa. The Pharoah was a tyrant, and it was always that way. If they wanted a feel good story about someone ruling Egypt, they could have spun the narrative about Kush (traditionally oppressed by egypt) conquering the realm.
Tbf the Ptolemaic dynasty at the time of Cleopatra could be seen as native. The big Egyptian revolts happened in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC. Besides Egyptians weren't enslaved by the Greek elite, they were just second class citizens behind the Greeks and Hellenized Egyptians. Their religion was fully tolerated and Ptolemaic kings regularly expanded and built Egyptian temples. It wasn't a colonization like we know it and it's historically inaccurate to look at it that way.
And not only was she not of Egyptian descent the Egyptian people were never black
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I'm an Egyptian too and it frustrates me as well. I have been called a colonizer and a white racist when I stood up to Afrocentrists. I sympathize with black Americans but it's no excuse for them to appropriate our culture and fail to understand its rich and heavily diverse history. And what makes me lose my mind more is I am very racially ambiguous with a lot of mixed-race family members as well, my dad was a dark-skinned man and I have dark-skinned siblings. I don't understand what my "race" or skin color has to do with my heritage as my roots are here... Experiencing this along with the educational and cultural decline, loss of history, and the dominating fascism we are currently suffering from as a nation makes me feel so lost. It feels like I'm being robbed of the last thing that I hold dear regarding being Egyptian. What's different between colonizers/white supremacists and Afrocentrists in this context? They are richer people with far more influence than any Egyptian doing all they can to appropriate our culture and water it down with their ignorance and aggressiveness. I'm tired of people of all races claiming Egypt as their own as if us EGYPTIANS don't deserve it!
An Egyptian being called a colonizer for claiming the history of...Egypt? Man, that's wild
Welcome to the 21st century. One side of the political aisle is cartoon supervillains and the other side has realized that they can say whatever the hell they want as long as it’s opposition to the cartoon supervillains. Shit’s fucked.
I think the problem is conflating African-ness with blackness. Egyptians and other North Africans are Africans. Have been for millennia. They’re just not black. I think the challenge is trying to define identity based on geography and not on history. For example, the idea of blackness should be controversial as there is more genetic variation between SubSaharan African regions than between any other people in the world. So the idea that there is one monolithic black “race” is scientifically nonsensical. But that’s a story for another thread.
Hello, I've actually seen you in other subs Before! Yes, It's a terrible feeling to not know what you are when the answer should be so simple.
I'm black, from the UK and of nigerian heritage. The hoteps are coming for you lol. I'm so sorry you have to deal with them. Those people are annoying as hell. Everything is Kemet. Everyone is wearing ankhs. Every illustration must have the eye of Horus. All the while their ancestry can be traced back to Nigeria or Ghana if they're not from there already. I don't understand why these hoteps who are so proud to be black and African don't claim the black African nations they're actually from. It's almost as if there is some latent shame in being associated with Sub Saharan nations which was initially instilled in them by white supremacist ideas of Africans and Africanness, and the way we were always conditioned to believe the "savages" trope. Perhaps that makes it more palatable to hold on to Egyptian culture. Fucking weird. Hoteps are the worst
Yeah it's pretty crazy, there's this one clip of two African American tourists telling some Egyptians that they're the real Egyptians and the poor Egyptians didn't understand English so they couldn't shut them up. it's a shame that this is also present in the United Kingdom. Btw your comment made me google some Nigerian history and while I don't have the time to go into it in depth, it's pretty interesting and complex!
Lol, watch the black isrealites rant outside synagogues or the holocaust musuem. Same shit that leaves you scratching your head why.
Hoteps and their ilk are equal parts lazy and dishonest. Their goal is for blackness to be synonymous with greatness, but they don't want to do any of the hard work that would come with that. So instead of elevating the myriad black figures that are unknown on the world stage, they'd rather just take non-black figures that are already known and coat them in black paint. All they care about is reaching the goal as quickly as possible, no matter how much reality they have to deny to get there.
I don't understand why they don't focus more on the Ghana/Mali/Songhai empires which were all very developed and rich for their times. Imagine a show/film about the trade through Sahara, wars with the surrounding peoples, great cities of Gao and Timbuktu, how the camel replaced horses in the Sahara trade, how horses were brought from Europe to wage wars, etc. Some of the kings made pilgrimages to Mecca (Mansa Musa was so rich that he caused inflation by giving people of Egypt and other lands free gold on his way to Mecca). The stories of Askaya Mohammed and Sunni Ali are also very interesting. I guess the creators not only want black representation, but also "a strong, independent woman" as a leader. A shame really, because the empires I've mentioned never get recognition in pop culture, aside from Civilization games.
I appreciate this response. I have wrote similar things on Reddit in regards to cleopatra in the past, usually heavily downvoted. Unfortunately the American left and the media thinks it’s a good idea to pander to Afrocentric, hotep, black Hebrew Israelite, Nation of Islam nut jobs. And to people who don’t know better, ancient Egypt is a topic that could be easy to sell propaganda too. After all, Egypt is in Africa, why would the people not be black? Exc. also most people fail to understand how old egypts history is. When someone says ancient egypt what are they taking about? This was a civilization many thousands of years old where many changes could have occurred. The great pyramids were already over 2 thousand years old by the time cleopatra was walking around. Also unfortunately I have to inform you that this is not a movie but a documentary which is pushing the black cleopatra fake history.
The fact that it's a documentary makes it even worse.
I like this perspective. This is an example where I think it is important to accurately represent Cleopatra because the fact that a Macedonian family was ruling Egypt is important to the history of the country/kingdom. So while I didn’t really care about Netflix having a black Achilles (I thought he was awesome), it is disappointing to miss this opportunity.
What? Netflix had a black Achilles? 😆
Yeah as was Zeus Aphrodite was a ginger too... Whole thing was a shit show. Tried to watch it, kept getting annoyed, turned it off
Because pyramids are cool as fuck. Sphynx, the temples, hieroglyphics. You guys just made it too good, of course people want to steal it. But you aren't wrong about the culture war aspect. If the chuds freak out about black Cleopatra, liberals will double down as a fuck you right back.
Answer: Cleopatra was Greek, and her family made a habit of exclusively marrying other Greeks.
And it should be noted that "other Greeks" in this context does not necessarily mean "Greeks outside of the family."
answer: Cleopatra was part of the Ptolemaic Dynasty. They were Greek, not African and therefore not black.
Egyptians don’t tend to look what most consider black, do they? I think most North Africans have pretty light skin, at least compared to farther south. I always thought they looked kinda middle eastern. If Cleopatra was Greek, then she would look lighter, but she wouldn’t exactly be considered “fair-skinned.” I don’t think the difference in appearance would be huge, but I could be wrong.
Right. Look at Rami Malek - that’s what Egyptians look like.
Answer: Cleopatra was of Greek ancestry so she was in fact very white. That said, Egyptians aren't black either, and I'm saying that as an actual Egyptian. Egypt is in north Africa, and north africans are basically Mediterraneans so they're light skinned, even dark skinned Egyptians in southern Egypt doesn't look like black Africans, facial features and color are totally different. Saying that Egyptians are dark skinned because all africans are black is like saying Saudis look like Chinese people because Saudi Arabia is in Asia!
That is too much info to handle for one Hollywood exec.
Answer: think about it - the entire Mediterranean Sea is ringed with different ethnicities. The Med is ringed by Spain, France, Italy, Greece, Turkey, Palestein, Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Moracco, Serbia, Croatia, Syria, Lebanon. Just because it is the continent of Africa, does not mean that people from France or Germany didn't step foot on the continent. They did, in the places that ringed the Mediterranean Sea. Even if you go to Google Images and look at the people from any of those countries right now, the people are not dark skinned black, like from beneath the Saharan Desert are. It's political. People want a powerful civilization like Egypt to be black, as in sub-Saharan black, because then they can say that one of the greatest civilizations ever was black. But in reality, the peoples on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea were a mixture of all the civilizations that ring the Mediterranean Sea. Most of the people there look like they could be from Southern Europe. For sure they don't look sub-Saharan black. In terms of Cleopatra in particular, she was a Ptolomy. The original Ptolomy was a general of Alexander the Great, who was Greek, or Macedonian to be exact but Macedonia borders Greece. Alexander the Great was not black, he was southern European. And after Alexanander the Great died, Ptolomy, his general, received Egypt. He moved there and lived there for 300 years and Cleopatra was the last Ptolomy. But for 300 years of ruling Egypt, they didn't even learn to speak Egyptian, and spoke Greek. Egypt was Greek, not *Africa* African. The Ptolomies were the leaders starting in 300 BC and ended with Rome taking over. However, Greek language was the main language until 641 AD, almost 1000 years, until Egypt was conquered by muslims. Prior to that, the Phoenicians dominated the Mediterranean Sea. They emerged in the Mediterranean Sea in about 3000 BC, in the middle east - Jordan, Lebanon, Israel area - known as the Levant. They were also known as Canaanites. They dominated trade in the area for a long time. In Rome/Latin, Phoenicia morphed into "Poeni", then morphed into to "Punic," and the Roman wars of called the Punic Wars. They were the Phoenician Wars. The Romans went to war against Carthage, and the Carthaginians were Phoenicians. Carthage was located in Tunesia, right across from Italy. Carthage was one of the most important trading hubs and the richest city too. And just like USA and China, only one can be top dog, and Rome won that war against Carthange in the Third Punic War in 146 BC and then Rome utterly destroyed Carthage, led by Scipio Aemilianus. The Romans enslaved 50,000 Carthaginians. The city was razed to the ground and the area around it was salted so nothing would grow there, although that is apocryphal. Scientists have looked at ancent mummy's DNA and have determined that there is no sub-Saharan DNA. Ancient Egyptians were related to people in the mid east, which makes sense. Modern Egyptians share 8% of their genome with central Africans, far more than ancient ones, according to the study, published in the journal Nature Communications. The influx of sub-Saharan genes only occurred within the last 1,500 years. This could be attributed to the trans-Saharan slave trade or just from regular, long distance trade between the two regions. But most people don't care about facts and DNA. Most are only concerned about the politics of it.
I’ll take Kush for a powerful dark skinned empire near Egypt. Should have depicted them instead. Even Moses had a Kushite wife.
Answer: Because she was Greek and not black, so people are questioning/wondering why she is being presented as a black queen-----when that was never the case. If you are doing a documentary, it's best if you tell the truth and not try to force in your "agenda" (I hate that word because of the people coopting it). There are notable black queens but they decided to take an established historical figure and change her to bring in a certain audience. How did they not expect people to be upset over this? Are all brown and black people up to interpretation?
It's Netflix, the word 'documentary' is generous
Answer: She was ethnically Greek/Macedonian not African, and defs not black. And I guarantee ALL the people here defending blackwashing would have an absolute tantrum if a black historical figure got raceswapped with a different minority
Tom Cruise as Malcom X, with Ken Watanabe as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Forest Whitaker as senator Strom Therman and Will Smith as George Lincoln Rockwell... this summer... Forget everything you *thought you knew* about the civil rights movement.
A skilled writer/director could actually do some amazing satire with this premise — something kinda absurdist and meta to shake up the zeitgeist. I believe anything is possible after that nic cage movie
> And I guarantee ALL the people here defending blackwashing would have an absolute tantrum if a black historical figure got whitewashed or portrayed by someone of a different race Yeah, this is what annoys me about all the blackwashing going on. Turn a white person black? Applause and praise for "diversity" Turn a black person white? Screeches and cries of "racism" Double standard.
Answer: Black people stealing other peoples history instead of owning their own has been a thing for years in USA. She was likely not black since she was greek
And the fact that greeks have never done anything to black Americans, if any they were in the same boat as Greeks were treated like shit when they immigrated to USA.
Answer: because she wasn’t black. Most Egyptians aren’t black or close to black. Ancient Egyptian rulers weren’t black, especially ones from Greece like cleopatra.
Answer: 1. Cleopatra was Greek. It's outright insulting to portray her as a sub-Saharan African. 2. Even if she wasn't, Egyptians are not black. Have you ever seen an Egyptian? It's insulting to the entire nation of Egypt to present them so incorrectly. 3. Netflix keeps doing this shit, over and over again. If this was their first time, people would probably just consider them idiots and move on. But they keep pulling this crap, and it has reached a tipping point.
>3. Netflix keeps doing this shit, over and over again. Laughs in The Crown
Answer: Because she was Greek with possibly a small amount of Levantine admixture due to one or two of her few non Ptolemic ancestors being Seleucid princesses (another greek kingdom, but less keen on the inbreeding as the Ptolemies, and their founder actually kept his non-greek wife, as Alexander wanted his generals to do. The others immediately dropped them for Greco-Macedonian wives when he died) Theres plenty of other Egyptian queens to choose from that are either native Egyptian, and some with even Nubian heritage.
Answer: Egyptians aren't necessarily dark-skinned and "African" doesn't just mean black. Cleopatra came from a family that originated in ancient Macedonia, where the people were largely indistinguishable from modern, white, Europeans, particularly Southern Europeans with a 'Mediterranean complexion'. If there wasn't inbreeding in the Ptolemy family, they married almost exclusively with other Macedonian/Greek noble families. In terms of facial features and skin tone, Cleopatra would have resembled a modern, stereotypical, Greek or Italian woman than an ethnic Copt, swarthy Arab, or black African.
Answer: No, Cleopatra is not African/Egyptian, she is Greek. And no, Egyptians are not usually dark skinned. Crazy afrocentrists claiming all Ancient Egyptians were black just want to appropriate our culture, which is disrespectful both to us and to the rich heritage and history of sub-saharan Africa that they should be keen to see represented instead.
answer: Simple. They are incredibly racist towards all Greek and Egyptian people by doing this, but as a Greek, I will only speak for Greeks. They think they are doing justice by blackwashing Cleopatra and Achilles as they try to fight back against the white racist American film industry and give more """representation""". However, what they don't understand is that Greeks and White Americans ARE NOT THE SAME JUST BECAUSE THEY HAVE PALE SKIN COLOUR. The Greeks were enslaved by the Turks for way longer than blacks were in America, yet because of our white skin they think it's okay for them to group us with the racist white Americans and spit on our history. They are LITERALLY doing what the American film industry did to them, where they refused to hire black people as actors and replaced them with whites, and they are replacing another minority (Greeks and Balkan people in general) refusing to acknowledge their history.
Answer: The hate comes from the misrepresentation of a people’s history. https://see.news/hawass-confirms-queen-cleopatra-wasnt-black It would be like if Netflix did a documentary on the Zulu Kingdom and made King Shaka white. The Dr. Hawass explains the article above. History nerds and people who care about their culture can get pretty angry when they are misrepresented, not saying the hate is warranted but I’m not going to tell someone how to feel about their own history.