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.
Born in Alexandria in 69BC, Cleopatra VII, the last queen of the Ptolemaic Hellenistic dynasty, was an Egyptian ruler of Macedonian heritage, and possibly with a Persian and black African background too, though this is deeply contested. The casting of James as Cleopatra has, however, as much to do with contemporary sensibilities as with historical fact. “We don’t often get to see or hear stories about black queens,” observed Jada Pinkett Smith, the drama’s executive producer, “and that was really important for me, as well as for my daughter, and just for my community to be able to know those stories.”
The idea that Cleopatra was black has a long history in African American thought, especially within the black nationalist and Afrocentrist movements. Many have claimed Egypt to be a black nation, and one from which ancient Greece stole its culture and ideas. For a people enslaved and oppressed, and living within a racist world that loudly proclaimed they had come from a continent with no history, the lure of Egypt, and of Cleopatra, as black was often irresistible.
The publication in 1987 of the first volume of Black Athena by Martin Bernal, a British scholar of Chinese political history, brought this discussion into both academia and wider public consciousness. Bernal argued that much of Greek classical culture was rooted in that of ancient Egypt, but this link had been erased by the rise of Eurocentric views in the 18th century. Many of his claims have been debunked but, on both sides, the fierce debate over the book has been driven as much by polemic as by fact.
More recently, the classicist Shelley Haley has argued that, while it is “anachronistic” to imagine that the ancients viewed race as we do, modern sensibilities can be useful in framing how we perceive Cleopatra. “My grandmother was white,” Haley writes, “had straight black hair, and the nose of her [Native American] Onondagan grandmother but she was ‘colored’” because of the “one-drop rule” – the insistence that “if we have one Black ancestor, then we are Black.” Similarly, Cleopatra was undoubtedly “the product of miscegenation”; so “how is it she is not Black?” Haley adds that “Cleopatra reacted to the phenomena of oppression and exploitation as a Black woman would. Hence we embrace her as sister.”
This is history as allegory, the view of the past as primarily a resource on which to draw to meet the social and psychological needs of the present. It betrays, too, the degree of contemporary confusion over race that the one-drop rule, imposed by racists to preserve white “purity”, should now be wielded by black scholars and activists as a tool to uplift African Americans.
If the projection of Cleopatra as black is rooted in myth and wish fulfilment, that of her as “white” equally taps into racial fables. Cleopatra was an Egyptian queen of Macedonian descent. But that does not make her “white”. Cleopatra’s whiteness is the product of the racial thinking entrenched in modernity.
The ancients certainly divided humanity into different groups and recognised differences of colour. But they did not categorise people in racial terms as we do, nor attribute the same social meanings to human differences. Whether we are talking of Cleopatra or Aristotle, to portray them as “white” is to project a contemporary racial sensibility into the past.
Even in the modern world, most Euro-American thinkers, such as Benjamin Franklin, would not, until the 20th century, have seen an Egyptian or a Macedonian or a Greek of their day as white. At the same time, ancient Greece became embraced as the source of the western intellectual and artistic tradition, so, while modern Greeks were not necessarily white, ancient Greeks were. The history of race is full of such absurd contradictions.
In Egypt itself, many have been scandalised by the casting of Cleopatra as black, proclaiming it as “falsifying facts” and “erasing Egyptian identity”. It’s a reaction that draws on many threads, from a nationalist yearning to project a unique Egyptian identity to a strand of anti-blackness and a desire to differentiate the Arab world from “sub-Saharan” Africa, itself a category that only emerged in the 20th century. Not all Egyptians adopt such views, of course, but the Cleopatra controversy inevitably has a special edge within the country.
There is nothing wrong in casting Cleopatra as black. The problem lies in the resonances that flow from that. James is no more and no less authentically a Cleopatra than Elizabeth Taylor was. Ancient commentary on Cleopatra reveals little interest in discussing her identity in the way the modern world obsessively does.
However Cleopatra is cast, it is a decision shaped by modern political desires or fantasies. The very question “was Cleopatra black or white?” – and the answers we give – tell us much more about ourselves, and our world, and the confusions that beset our understanding of race and identity, than they do about Cleopatra and her world.
• Kenan Malik is an Observer columnist
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