Firestorm on Social Media as Fans Rage Over Netflix's Black Cleopatra
The trailer for the upcoming documentary series has received significant backlash for its questionable statements.
Queen Cleopatra, the upcoming Netflix documentary TV series, sparked a major controversy with its first trailer.
The depiction of the legendary Egyptian queen as black seemed to be much more than a simple artistic choice, as the trailer's narration suggests, and is a major historical inaccuracy.
The first thing to note is that changing the race of a historical figure is perfectly acceptable as long as it is simply an artistic choice and not a deliberate misrepresentation.
A good example of this was a Channel 5 television series called Anne Boleyn in 2021, in which the titular queen was portrayed by a black actress, Jodie Turner-Smith.
The show did not explicitly state that it was 100% historically accurate, and that the casting decision was about finding the right person for the job, rather than preserving the right skin color of the character.
The situation with Cleopatra is different, however, with one of the trailer's narrators saying, "I remember my grandmother saying to me: I don't care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black".
This led viewers to believe that the show was presenting the titular character's race as historically accurate, and many people quickly accused Netflix of blackwashing.
Cleopatra was a member of a Greek dynasty that ruled Egypt, tracing back to Alexander the Great's general Ptolemy.
The Ptolemies married other Greeks, and occasionally even their sisters, an ancient Egyptian custom among the pharaohs that their many Greek subjects found distasteful.
Although the name of Cleopatra's mother is unknown, there are good reasons to insist that she was not of Egyptian descent, most likely partially related to the dynasty of Mithridates.
In fact, Cleopatra was the first Ptolemaic ruler of Egypt to even bother to learn Egyptian.
Viewers point out that it would not have been a problem at all if the series had presented itself as a work of fiction, but it is called a documentary, so it only spreads misinformation.
They joke that just because Grandma tells you something doesn't make it fact.
Others bring up the fact that if Netflix wanted to make a documentary about black Egyptians, maybe they should have chosen the Nubian dynasty, which wouldn't even require race-swapping.
Source: Reddit, Netflix