From the New York Times opinion section:

Fear of a Black Cleopatra
May 10, 2023
A photo illustration of a Black woman’s face, with an illustration of a white woman superimposed on it as a headdress, along with Egyptian symbols.=

By Gwen Nally and Mary Hamil Gilbert

Dr. Nally is an associate professor of philosophy at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. Dr. Gilbert is an assistant professor of classics at Mississippi State University.

The new Netflix docudrama series “Queen Cleopatra,” produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, has already elicited a passionate response, though perhaps not the kind that publicists hoped for. Since news broke that the series would star the British actress Adele James, fans, Egyptologists, scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity and Arab and Greek news outlets have been debating whether the series willfully distorts history. The reason? “Queen Cleopatra” depicts the legendary monarch as Black.

Cleopatra, who died in 30 B.C., remains a source of pride for disparate communities. Many contemporary Egyptians view her as a key figure in the preservation of their history and even as a role model for contemporary Egyptian women. Greeks have also claimed her, noting that she was of Macedonian and Greek descent.

… In contemporary American pop culture, the assertion is often stated as fact, with her characterized as a beautiful and powerful Black African queen, her name commonly referred to as such in hip-hop.

“Queen Cleopatra,” however, has touched an international nerve. The debate around the docudrama escalated when an Egyptian lawyer called for Egyptian authorities to censure Netflix, accusing it of misrepresenting “Egyptian identity.” …

… So regardless of the material a sculptor may have chosen to use to summon Cleopatra’s powerful visage, there is no meaningful sense in which she—or anyone else of her era—would have identified as white.

She certainly wouldn’t have identified as sub-Saharan, but that’s not the point. The point is she was a beautiful and strong African queen, which means she was black.

Netflix’s casting was informed by the views of Shelley Haley, a renowned classicist and Cleopatra expert, who claims that, although evidence of her ancestry and physical attributes are inconclusive, Cleopatra was culturally Black.

When the Roman poet Propertius famously called Cleopatra a whore queen (meretrix regina), he laced his misogynist tirade with allusions to Egypt, such as the “noxious” city of Alexandria and the “yapping” Egyptian god Anubis.

Hence, the ancient Egyptians were into what my nonagenarian father called “yap music.”

Dr. Haley argues that Cleopatra’s experience was part of a history of oppression of Black women.

To recognize Cleopatra as culturally Black is not to pretend that skin color is meaningless now—in the manner of recent figures like Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, who claimed a cultural identity that was not theirs.

But Rachel Dolezal is a loser, unlike Cleopatra. Granted in the end she was a loser too, which makes her black, but she kicked a lot of ass in the meantime which makes her black, too.

Cleopatra was black. You may even have evidence to the contrary. But would it worth being fired and having your job replaced by a megalomaniacal black woman who thinks Cleopatra must have been black because reasons?

Cleopatra was black.