Egyptian historians are arguing with historical support and logic while Jada Pinkett Smith, who’s producing QC, is basically just arguing, “Hey, she coulda been black. Ya never know. Coulda happened.”
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/netflix-queen-cleopatra-controversy-egyptian-broadcaster_n_645beb76e4b005be8ff10516
Jada Pinkett Smith is proving that woke leftists are actually just fine with cultural appropriation when they are the ones doing it.
From the article, she is quoted as saying:
“We don’t often get to see or hear stories about Black queens, 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 because there are tons of them!”
Well, if there are tons of them, then why did they have to pick one that wasn't? Cleopatra wasn't black. That seems fairly certain actually, from the available historical evidence. The depictions of her in art, some of which were contemporaneous, do not show her as black. Her ancestry -- Macedonian/Greek, with some admixture of Persian and Sogdian -- is definitively not black. She does not appear to have had any Egyptian blood at all, never mind sub-Saharan African, because there is not a single known Egyptian wife of a Ptolemaic king, and the Ptolemies were notorious for marrying siblings and cousins to keep the royal bloodline "untainted" by non-royal blood. Moreover, Cleopatra VII was actually the first person in her three century-old dynasty even to bother learning the Egyptian language, so all the evidence actually goes against, not for admixture with the native Egyptian population. And even if she had Egyptian ancestry (which appears doubtful) that still doesn't make her black, because Egyptians aren't the same as sub-Saharan Africans.
Cultural appropriation is a term for which I usually have no patience, but this is far worse than wearing hoop earrings, a Cheongsam dress, or opening a burrito stand, this is stealing someone else's history in order to support a false narrative: "we wuz kangz an shiet." That's a phrase that is purported to be racist (though everything is called racist these days) and I am reluctant to use it, but here it really does fit. It is literally exactly what Jada Pinkett Smith is doing.
To "fight back" is to give the claim that she was black more dignity that it deserves. It's so absurd it should just be ignored (although I'm guilty of not ignoring it). Besides, the people who believe she was, or could have been, black will never be convinced otherwise, no matter how big the mountain of logic is you pile before them. It's a lost cause, so they might as well be left alone to enjoy their ignorant, preposterous delusion.
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