Haley’s approach to defining Cleopatra as black slots into this broader agenda and was the subject of a New York Times piece titled “Fear of a Black Cleopatra.” Her anti-historical ideas are given favorable treatment by the authors, who defend not just Netflix’s casting choice, but the claim that Cleopatra was herself black, if not ethnically then culturally.
The piece lays out the crux of Haley’s claims about Cleopatra: the idea of so-called “cultural Blackness.” This concept is explained as follows: “When we say, in general, that the ancient Egyptians were Black and, more specifically, that Cleopatra was Black,” Dr. Haley wrote, “we claim them as part of a culture and history that has known oppression and triumph, exploitation, and survival.” …
The idea that “cultural Blackness” is defined as the knowledge of “oppression and triumph, exploitation and survival” is not only deeply reductive, but it is also so broadly defined as to be useless in historical analysis.
[So … the Irish are black? Come on, man. Oppression wasn’t limited to Africa, and oppressors weren’t limited to Caucasians. I guess these ‘historians’ have never heard of the Mongols, to use just one example, or for that matter the Arabs, who displaced the Greek and Roman regimes in North Africa, including Egypt. Besides, the Ptolemaic dynasty that produced Cleopatra was a lineage of inbred Macedonians with sibling marriages at times. They not only didn’t have “blackness,” they barely had genetic variation, and their ‘culture’ was Greek, not sub-saharan African. — Ed]
Join the conversation as a VIP Member