Last Updated on May 31, 2023
The Netflix series Queen Cleopatra, which depicts the former queen of Egypt Cleopatra as a black woman in defiance of historical evidence, continues to spark international outrage.
Netflix, the beleaguered Silicon Valley streaming service, is hosting a much-ballyhooed docuseries executive produced by Jada Pinkett Smith, the wife of Oscars slapper Will Smith, as part of Jada’s series on so-called “African Queens.” Many people in the world are not happy about this, because evidence suggests that Cleopatra was not actually black.
Cleopatra was the inheritor of a Macedonian royal dynasty that she and her husband Mark Antony squandered by losing a Roman civil war, prompting Cleopatra and Mark Antony to kill themselves. Despite her tragic ending, Cleopatra lives on as a figure of glamour and intrigue in history. She has been portrayed in popular culture numerous times, perhaps most notably by white woman Elizabeth Taylor in the 1963 movie Cleopatra.
The government of Egypt weighed in on the controversy, stating, “Statues of Queen Cleopatra confirm that she had Hellenistic (Greek) features, distinguished by light skin, a drawn-out nose and thin lips.” The outrage has prompted a government-linked network in Egypt to greenlight a “true story” of Cleopatra, so as not to allow Jada Pinkett Smith to be an authoritative historian on the matter of Cleopatra’s race.
A petition on Change.org to cancel the series was reportedly signed more than 85,000 times in under two days but it disappeared from the change.org website.
“Afrocentrism is a pseudoscience that is pushing a group’s agenda to claim Egypt’s history and rob the actual Egyptians of it. By using false articles and zero evidence, they are still attempting to falsify history,” the popular petition stated. The petition said: “Cleopatra was born in Alexandria, Egypt in the Ptolemaic dynasty to Greek descent. She was NOT black. This is in no way against black people, and is simply a wake up call to preserve the history and the integrity of the Egyptians and the Greeks.”
“The show is clearly done to complement the Afrocentric movement, which claims to be the owner of the ancient Egyptian civilization, and to consolidate what the movement promotes. Egypt was never black and it was never white, Egypt is just Egypt. There are many great African/black civilizations, but Egypt was/is NOT one of them. Sign the petition to stop the falsification of history!,” the petition demanded.
That petition got erased from the Change.org platform. Nevertheless, new Change.org petitions have sprouted to cancel the show.
What does it say about modern American pop culture that a big-budget streaming service and the wife of a Hollywood celebrity can get a project greenlit that has so many problems with it that it literally causes an international incident?
The Campaign Show with Patrick Howley recently analyzed the controversy on Twitter.
The Campaign Show | Walmart Drama And Uproar Over WOKE Cleopatra https://t.co/vwurT12uEh
— Patrick Howley (@HowleyReporter) May 15, 2023
