The great American erudite Benjamin Franklin worried in 1751 about the small number of "pure white people in the world". As he wrote, “all of Africa is black or brown. Asia is mostly brown... And in Europe, for the Spanish, Italians, French, Russians and Swedes, we would generally say that they are dark-skinned, as well as for the Germans... Saxons and English make up the main body of white people on the face of the earth."
Perhaps the question "who is white?" seems self-evident to us, but during the past three centuries it has caused heated debates. At that time, many groups that we consider white today would definitely not be described that way, from the Irish to the Slavs and Italians to the Jews. It took a long process of social negotiations and disputes before they too were admitted to the club of whites.
The boundaries between races are still disputed. The latest controversy surrounding the question of "who is white?" was sparked by Netflix's decision to cast the lead in its new drama series Queen Cleopatra awarded to black actress Adele James.
As in many such debates, the issues at stake are laden with layers of myth and ideology. A significant part of this controversy stems from the desire to impose contemporary notions of race and identity, white and black, on an ancient world that thought very differently about these matters. Even identities such as Egyptian, Greek, Macedonian and African have significantly different connotations today than they did two millennia ago.
Cleopatra VII, the last queen of the Hellenistic Ptolemaic dynasty, was born in Alexandria in 69 BC. However, James as Cleopatra has as much to do with contemporary sensibilities as with historical facts. "We don't often see stories about black queens," noted Jada Pinkett Smith, the show's executive producer. “It was very important for me and my daughter; it's time for my community to see such stories."
The idea that Cleopatra was a black woman has a long history in African-American thought, particularly within black nationalist and Afrocentrist movements. Hence the claims that Egypt is a black nation from which ancient Greece stole culture and ideas. To enslaved and oppressed people in a racist world, who felt that their continent had no history of its own, the thought that Egypt and Cleopatra were black was often irresistibly attractive.
When the first volume of Black Athens by Martin Bernal, a British expert on Chinese political history, was published in 1987, this debate entered both academic and wider public consciousness. Bernal argued that much of Greek classical culture was rooted in the culture of ancient Egypt, and that this connection was erased during the rise of Eurocentric attitudes in the 18th century. Many of his claims were later disproved.
More recently, classicist Shelley Haley has argued that while it is anachronistic to imagine that the ancients understood race as we do, modern sensibilities can be useful in shaping how we perceive Cleopatra. "My grandmother was white," Haley writes, "had straight black hair and a nose like her native Onondagan grandmother, but was considered colored because of the one-drop rule - if we have one black ancestor, then we are black." Similarly, Cleopatra was undoubtedly "a product of miscegenation, so how could she not be black"? Haley adds that "Cleopatra reacted to oppression and exploitation as a black woman would." Therefore, we accept her as our sister."
Here we have an example of history as an allegory, where the past is seen primarily as a resource for meeting the social and psychological needs of the present. This approach also betrays a high degree of contemporary confusion about race, which leads to black scholars and activists now obeying the one-drop rule, once imposed by racists to preserve the purity of the white race.
If the projection of Cleopatra as a black woman is rooted in myth and the desires of black people, representations of her as white equally fit into racial fables. Cleopatra was an Egyptian queen of Macedonian origin, but that does not make her white. Our view of her is a product of modern ideas about race.
Antiquity certainly divided humanity into different groups and knew the differences in skin color. But people were not categorized in racial terms as in our time, nor were human differences assigned the same social meanings. Whether we're talking about Cleopatra or Aristotle, to portray them as white is to project contemporary racial sensibilities onto the past.
Even in the modern world, most Euro-American thinkers, such as Benjamin Franklin, would not have seen an Egyptian, Macedonian or Greek of their time as white until the 20th century. On the other hand, ancient Greece is accepted as the source of the Western intellectual and artistic tradition, so while modern Greeks are not necessarily white, the ancient Greeks are. The history of the race is full of such absurd contradictions.
In Egypt itself, many were shocked by the decision to portray Cleopatra as black, because it was "falsifying the facts" and "erasing the Egyptian identity". This reaction draws on a variety of themes, from the nationalist projection of a unique Egyptian identity to elements of anti-black racism and the desire to distinguish the Arab world from sub-Saharan Africa, a category that emerged only in the 20th century. Not all Egyptians accept such views, of course, but the Cleopatra controversy carries particular weight.
There is no problem with Cleopatra being played by a black woman, but the reactions to it are problematic. Adele James is no more or less an authentic Cleopatra than Elizabeth Taylor was. Ancient texts about Cleopatra do not consider her identity in the way that we obsessively do.
Whoever is assigned the role of Cleopatra is a decision shaped by current political desires and fantasies. The question of whether Cleopatra was black or white and our answers to it tell us much more about ourselves, about our world and the confusion that reigns in our understanding of race and identity, than about Cleopatra and the world in which she lived.
(The Guardian; Peščanik.net; translation: M. Jovanović)
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