“I remember my grandmother saying to me, ‘I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’”
So says one of the voiceovers advertising a Netflix docuseries about powerful women. As a one-sentence summary of our current cultural moment, it is hard to beat. Lived experience trumps data, and “my truth” trumps verifiable fact — especially when it comes to race.Oddly enough, the Egyptians don’t seem to have gotten the memo.
But not, it seems, when the imposition of American values involves strong women and racial empowerment. Then we’re all for Afrocentrism, and we play along with the claim that the pyramids were built by Wakandans. We in the Anglosphere are used to a certain asymmetry in casting. We know that we are supposed to nod along approvingly when a black actress plays Anne Boleyn, but to object furiously to the idea of a white actress playing, say, Rosa Parks. We expect the hypothesis that the pyramids were built by black pharaohs to be received more politely than the hypothesis that they were built by aliens from another solar system — a theory for which there is neither more nor less evidence.
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