
CASTING CLEOPATRA IN BLACK AND WHITE
by Kenan Malik
This essay, on the debate around Netflix casting a black actor as Cleopatra, was my Observer column this week. It was published on 23 April 2023, under the headline “When Cleopatra was alive, she wasn’t categorised by the colour of her skin”. 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, […]
Categories: Culture & Books, History, Race & Immigration • Tags: afrocentrism, ancient egypt, ancient greece, black identity, cleopatra, egypt, hellenistic world, identity politics, jada pinkett smith, martin bernal, netflix, racial categories, racism, shelley haley, white race