When Cleopatra was alive, she wasn't categorised by the colour of her skin
In 1751, the great American polymath Benjamin Franklin worried about the small number of “purely white People in the World”. “All Africa,” he wrote, “is black or tawny. Asia chiefly tawny... And in Europe, the Spaniards, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, are generally of what we call a swarthy Complexion; as are the Germans also.” Only “the Saxons… [and] the English make the principal Body of White People on the Face of the Earth.”
The question of “who is white?” might seem to us today as self-evident. Yet it has over the past three centuries been fiercely contested. Many groups we now think of as white were certainly not seen as such for much of that period, from the Irish to the Slavs, from Italians to Jews. It took a long process of social negotiation and conflict before they were admitted into the club of whiteness.
Today, too, racial boundaries remain in dispute. The latest “who is white?” controversy has emerged from the decision by Netflix to cast a black actor, Adele James, as Cleopatra in its new drama series, Queen Cleopatra.
As with many such debates, the issues are shrouded in layers of myth and ideology. Much of the controversy arises from the desire to impose contemporary notions of race and identity, of whiteness and blackness, on an ancient world that thought very differently about such issues. Even identities such as “Egyptian”, “Greek”, “Macedonian” and “African” have significantly different connotations today than they did two millennia ago.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/23/when-cleopatra-was-alive-she-wasnt-categorised-by-colour-of-her-skin
Fascinating article. I believe in one race only....HUMAN.
= new reply since forum marked as read
Pinkish Gray.
It helps to never call a person a racist. I use bigot now.
They lived in their own city. They married among the other Greek-speaking elite. And intermarried. Sometimes closely, hence Ptolemy Philadelphus. We know their family tree, because that also was important to them.
What goes wrong with most portrayals of Cleopatra isn't how she looked, but who the Ptolemies were. They were foreigners who ruled Egypt by right of conquest, quite conscious of their own separate origin and language and heritage. Identifying Cleopatra with the people she ruled would be like identifying Robert Bulwer-Lytton as Keralan, because he was made Viceroy of India. The late 19th c. rulers of India weren't from India. The Ptolemies weren't from Egypt.
