Colorizing Cleopatra

Ponder a hypothetical baseball game, where the pitcher on the mound is so enamored of his fastball that he keeps throwing it over and over, even as every batter he faces it hits it out of the park. He's so convinced it's the right thing to do that he makes a laughing stock of not only himself, but of the art of pitching itself. Like every Chicken Little in history, his motivation is "THIS time, it’ll work!"

Those of a certain age might recollect the Gas-House Gorillas conga-lining around the bases.

This bit of musing was prompted by the latest episode of woke-washing, the Netflix series Queen Cleopatra, and the seemingly unending efforts to “colorize” both fictional characters of the past and actual persons of historical note.

As described at IMDB, it is the "[f]ictionalized Netflix-story about Queen Cleopatra of Egypt of the Ptolemaic lineage from Macedonia, Greece, that ruled for 21 years, between the years 51 BC and 30 BC, ending with her suicide."

The controversy? Casting and depicting Cleopatra as black.

The problem? Cleopatra was not black.

There is supposedly some dispute about that, but the overwhelming evidence is that she was primarily of Macedonian (see: the northern part of Greece) descent, with some Persian and other Middle-Eastern mixed in. Born in Egypt to parents, grandparents, etc., born in Egypt, one can also assert that she is Egyptian, in the way that a fifth or sixth or seventh generation American is. Then, and now, Egyptians, as well as Middle Easterners and North Africans in general, are not considered black.

Thus, the depiction directly contravenes history. Nevertheless, excuses and justifications were offered:

"a nod to the centuries-long conversation about the ruler’s race. - Netflix

"I realized what a political act it would be to see Cleopatra portrayed by a Black actress." - filmmaker Tina Gharavi

"Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister? And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter." - Gharavi

"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." - Jada Pickett Smith, Executive Producer

Enough, already, with this identity-politics bludgeoning. It’s not only unnecessary, it’s counterproductive.

The Egyptian government and press are, needless to say, not amused.

The Internet has also had its say:

Since the only standards the Woke Left embraces are double, it's no surprise that we can be told it's totally wrong for Scarlett Johansson to play a trans man or Tilda Swinton to play an Asian, but it's perfectly fine and dandy for white characters to be portrayed by non-white actors. Not only fine and dandy, but proper and necessary. Even when "diversity" makes absolutely no sense, as in the Game of Thrones and Lord of the Rings prequel series (the Targaryens are an incestuous pale-skinned white-haired dynasty, and the hobbits of the Shire were a closed populace whose skin color would have long ago homogenized). Cultural appropriation is an abomination, except when it is "truth to power" or some such garbage.

Still, fictional characters are one thing. Historical revisionism is another. Everyone knows that the Founding Fathers were pasty white men of British descent, everyone knows that Hamilton wasn't asserting they were actually black or latino, and everyone understands that the play was intended as social commentary. Casting a black woman as Cleopatra in something dubbed a documentary, dramatized or not, “fictionalized” or not, on the other hand, is the propagation of a lie.

The Cleopatra casting is pure narcissistic arrogance. It's not being done by people who are in any way oppressed. Jada Pinkett Smith, the executive producer, is Hollywood royalty worth tens of millions (hundreds if you fold her husband in). Tina Gharavi, the director, has BAFTA and Sundance nominations on her resume. Netflix is a $146B company delivering content to 190 countries.

It is their money, and they can figuratively live or die by their decisions. The market will decide if this black-washing of ancient history garners an audience.

The real problem is the concept of factual relativism. While history does generate disagreements and disputes, and its readers should be cautioned as to degrees of certainty and uncertainty, casting Cleopatra as black isn't supported by a substantiated annotation. It's simply a producer's choice, intended as some sort of woke statement. Therein lies the problem. Facts are back-seated to agendas, as is reality itself. Truths, we are taught, are relative, and must be filtered through the oppressor-oppressed sieve that social justice types (notice, by the way, that 'social justice warrior' is no longer de mode?) apply to everything in the world. To understand, give a look at this peek inside NPR:

seemingly every second or third story from the NPR had to do with alleged race and gender "inequities."

Again, facts simply don't matter to today's Best-and-Brightest. Male-born trans athletes destroying women's sports. Radical, destructive domestic decarbonization coercions that will yield no significant impact on climate change. Endless printing of money and the inflation it causes. Entitlement programs sinking into insolvency. The Hunter Biden laptop and the worse-than-Watergate political chicanery involved in quashing the story. The Trump-Russia saga. Woke math. Woke science.

Everything we hear and everything children are taught nowadays is being designed around factual relativism and the oppressor-oppressed framework. Facts, even in math and the sciences where the pursuit of universal truth is the only objective, is secondary to political correctness and obeisance to preferred narratives.

Truth is the first casualty in war.

There is no doubt we are in the midst of a cultural war. The wagers of this war want us to believe it is one of societal evolution toward a more accepting and inclusive paradigm, but the reality is that those people are the least inclusive and least diverse, in the true meanings of those words. They are worse than overt racists and bigots. Whereas the latter make it clear where they stand, the Best-and-Brightest lie, equivocate, obfuscate, and gaslight in pursuit of a goal that at its heart is as illiberal, as oppressive, and as departed from facts and truths as Stalin's Soviet Union and Mao's Red China. The relativism they embrace is, whether many of them realize it or not, a major contributor to the destruction of a free and liberal society.

This colorizing of Cleopatra may be seen as bold and brave by some, and I'm certain that the same crowd will smugly declare that critics are closeted bigots who want to keep blacks oppressed. Most of these folks are the "useful idiots" the society-destroyers on the Left have sown and cultivated, while a few are of that arrogant-elite segment of Western Culture. The latter are the ones who came up with the AAPI (Asian and Pacific Islander) designation, cramming fifty-seven percent of the world's population and a range of ethnicities from Mongol to Maori, Arab to Korean, and Tatar to Chinese into one basket. They take a continent (Africa) that's nearly four times the size of the continental US, that contains 1.3 billion people, fifty-four nations, over three thousand ethnic groups, and a substantial population that's not-black, and put everyone there across millennia into the "black" basket (even as they categorize the Arabs, Berbers, and other North Africans as not-black.

If this sounds like they're just making shit up as they go along and in service to their whims, congratulations, you get it.

The good news is that their world is all one-upmanship, where the only way to stand out is in embrace of the next level of excess. This is an increasingly non-linear feedback loop, ratcheting the absurdity higher and higher. More and more people are peeling off from the movement, either visibly or quietly, and more are daring to criticize such woke-ifications as this latest bit. Velma, the ultra-woke Mindy Kaling helmed prequel to the Scooby-Doo franchise, garnered a 7% audience score on Rotten Tomatoes and a 1.5/10 on IMDB. Despite all this, a second season of Velma has been green-lit, making many wonder if the execs are so tone-deaf as to consider the noise it generated as positive feedback, or if they simply don't care and figure that once it's out there, the message it's intended to send will osmose despite the horrid reviews.

I’m curious to see how Cleopatra fares. I won’t watch it - not going to “vote” my viewing minutes in support of this business, and if I want to learn more about her, there are countless other resources that don’t rewrite history.

Will it garner a big enough audience to invite even greater heights of woke-revisionism and retconning attempts?

That may help chase even more people away from the on-going cultural thuggery. The more meatballs they fire down the heart of the plate that get ripped apart by the masses, the more people will realize how offensive their endeavors are. It may also serve to “wear down” those who find such ham-fisted excess objectionable - where those with lives to live (most of us) simply throw our hands up in resignation. One-issue fanatics rely on others’ busy lives to make their inroads, no matter the harm those may cause. As always, eternal vigilance…