Let’s Just Call the Outrage Around Queen Cleopatra What It Is: Racism

You’ll have caught wind of the discourse around Netflix’s docudrama Queen Cleopatra by now. The questions of historical inaccuracy and cultural appropriation—peppered with a predictable dose of racism—have made international headlines since the first trailer for the show dropped, introducing Cleopatra as a mixed-heritage Black woman.

Produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, the four-part series, which premiered on the streamer this week, sees the Egyptian monarch played by biracial British actress Adele James. Her casting was met with heavy-handed backlash almost immediately after it was announced—with certain scholars and both the Greek and Arab press enraged about what they described as the “blackwashing” of Egyptian history.

The passionate debate escalated when Egyptian lawyer Mahmoud al-Semary demanded that authorities ban the show in the country, accusing Netflix of misrepresenting “Egyptian identity” to “promote Afrocentric thinking.” He was echoed by a former minister of antiquities for Egypt named Zahi Hawass, who wrote a piece for Arab News claiming that Queen Cleopatra was rooted in “falsehood.” In the weeks since its publication, an Egyptian broadcaster has announced it will make its own version of the documentary with a light-skinned lead.

While concerns about historical accuracy and erasure are valid, particularly when depicting stories as nuanced as Cleopatra’s, even the use of the phrase “Afrocentric thinking” in such a context is damaging. For starters, it’s emboldened white supremacists, who’ve crawled out of the darkest corners of the internet to spew hate and racial slurs at the cast and creators of the show—just as they did when Disney announced Halle Bailey as the star of The Little Mermaid, and when Shonda Rhimes dared to present Black people in regal roles in Bridgerton.

Shortly after the trailer for Queen Cleopatra dropped, Netflix was forced to turn off the comments due to the volume of racial slurs being posted. James, who received the bulk of the verbal abuse, spoke out about the threatening messages she had been subjected to on her own Twitter page. “Just FYI, this kind of behavior won’t be tolerated on my account—you will be blocked without hesitation,” she tweeted, sharing screenshots of racist attacks referring to her as the N-word, “Black b*tch,” and “Cleopatra’s slave.”

Cleopatra’s race has long been regarded as ambiguous by scholars and historians. What we do know is that her father, Ptolemy XII, was of Macedonian-Greek descent, a member of the family that conquered Egypt more than 200 years before Cleopatra’s birth in 69 BC. Her mother’s identity, on the other hand, is unknown—although she may well have been Egyptian—which is where things get a little more complex. “Cleopatra ruled in Egypt long before the Arab settlement in North Africa,” said Dr, Sally Ann Ashton, a research scientist and author of Cleopatra and Egypt, who appears in the documentary. “If the maternal side of her family were indigenous women, they would’ve been African, and this should be reflected in contemporary representations of Cleopatra.”

To be clear, the docudrama isn’t, in fact, arguing that Cleopatra was a dark-skinned Black woman with no Macedonian-Greek heritage at all, although the media storm around it might make you assume otherwise. Rather, its creators, including scholar Shelley Haley, professor of classics and African studies at Hamilton College, have asked us to imagine her as a woman of mixed heritage, hence the casting of a biracial actress. “Her ethnicity is not the focus of Queen Cleopatra, but we did intentionally decide to depict her of mixed ethnicity to reflect theories about Cleopatra’s possible Egyptian ancestry and the multicultural nature of ancient Egypt,” a statement from Netflix reads.

Unsurprisingly, past depictions of Cleopatra featuring white women have been critically and publicly acclaimed, with Vivien Leigh, Claudette Colbert, and Elizabeth Taylor all appearing as the Egyptian queen over the course of the 20th century. Not one of these women is Macedonian, Greek, or Egyptian, meaning their casting was no more “authentic” than James’s, and yet it never incited scandal. And while Israeli actor Gal Gadot’s decision to play Cleopatra in a forthcoming biopic raised a few eyebrows when it was announced in 2020, it wasn’t met with nearly the level of vitriol as James’s casting.

Frankly, our obsession with “figuring out” Cleopatra’s race may not have shed much light on her actual heritage, but it tells us an awful lot about the current state of the world and the way in which it operates. Perhaps the real question we should be asking ourselves is why ancient scholars placed so little importance on Cleopatra’s race, yet the modern world remains fixated on it almost two millennia after her death? When you strip away the academic posturing, so much of the backlash we’ve seen around Queen Cleopatra is simply racism masquerading as a heroic quest for factual accuracy.

If there’s one thing that the reaction to James’s Queen Cleopatra has highlighted, it’s that, despite how progressive we may think we now are, the world still isn’t ready to accept the idea of people of color thriving in a historical context. Believe it or not, there was a time when not everything revolved around Europeans and whiteness. The Nigerian author and poet Chinua Achebe said it best with his age-old African proverb: “Until the lion learns to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” Don’t we know it.