Netflix sued by Egyptian lawyer for portraying Cleopatra as Black
Category: News & Politics
Via: vic-eldred • last year • 67 commentsBy: Adele James (Yahoo Entertainment)
S E E D E D C O N T E N T
Netflix's upcoming Queen Cleopatra docudrama isn't sitting well with one Egyptian man. Mahmoud al-Semary, a lawyer in the North African nation, filed a lawsuit with Egypt's public prosecutor against the streaming giant for its portrayal of the pharaoh.
"Most of what Netflix's platform displays does not conform to Islamic and societal values and principles, especially Egyptian ones," the complaint read, according toEgypt Independent. The trailer, he claimed, contradicts Egyptian history.
Al-Semary believes that the documentary promotes Afrocentrism and inaccurately portrays Cleopatra's race. "Netflix is trying to provoke confusion by spreading false and deceptive facts that the origin of the Egyptian civilization is Black," he said, per the BBC. The show, he continued, will "promote the Afrocentric thinking… which includes slogans and writings aimed at distorting and erasing the Egyptian identity."
"In order to preserve the Egyptian national and cultural identity among Egyptians all over the world there must be pride in the makings of such work," he added. See the trailer for the forthcoming production below.
Cleopatra's race has been a controversial subject in historical studies for centuries. While she was born in Alexandria, Egypt, she was descended from the Ptolemy line of rulers, whose history was in modern-day Greece. The Ptolemaic Kingdom was founded in 305 B.C. after Alexander the Great's conquest of Persian-controlled Egypt.
Perhaps the most infamous on-screen portrayal of the pharaoh queen was Elizabeth Taylor donning heavy makeup and gold beads in 1963's Cleopatra. In the new Netflix series, the ancient monarch will be played by Adele James, a British actress of mixed race. James' appearances in the show's promotional material is what led to al-Semary's outrage.
Jada Pinkett Smith is an executive producer and narrator for "African Queens," which will follow Cleopatra's story in its upcoming second season. Like its first go-around, it will combine dramatic recreations of historical events with interviews discussing those developments. When speaking with Netflix about the upcoming season of the show, she expressed her desire in showing a Cleopatra that doesn't look like Elizabeth Taylor, to say the least.
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"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!" the "Red Table Talk" host said. "The sad part is that we don't have ready access to these historical women who were so powerful and were the backbones of African nations."
Season 2 of "African Queens" premieres May 10.
As they might say at Columbia University: We just want to be historically accurate.
Jeffery Hunter was born in New Orleans , Louisiana, the son of Edith Lois (née Burgess) and Henry Herman McKinnies. His family was of Scottish ancestry.
Robert Powell is an English actor .
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By the way, these two actors were portraying Jesus, who was not white and was born in Palestine.
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actor Sam Jaffee Jaffee as Gunga Din
In other words WGAF ? The ship on accurately portraying historical figures in Hollywood sailed a hundred years ago.
Today we have right wingers complaining because a FICTIONAL character, the Little Mermaid, is being played by a black actress when the original cartoon character was white.
And then there is Santa Claus
In this video Megyn Kelly literally says "Jesus was a white man".
Yes indeed, Burt was truly a bronze warrior...Oh, wait...LOL
understandable, since it's usually been a white man on top of, or behind her, when she yells his name...
Jealousy is so unbecoming.
Of what race was Jesus?
The sparsely populated race of deity?
Why do you think Jesus was white?
I didn’t claim that he was although, historically most Mediterranean people were.
What race was that?
Not going down your typical rabbit hole.
BBC - Richard Neave’s forensic reconstruction of the face of a first-century man from Judea.
Who really cares?
Looks Greek, Arab, Mediterranean Jew or Egyptian to me.
Apparently JR.
Uh, let me explain my comments to you, since you dont seem to understand. Mentioning the race of Jesus (not white) was a DIRECT response to Vic's complaint that a Netflix show was turning Cleopatra black.
Its the same fucking thing. YET, we would never in a million years see someone like Vic object to Jesus being portrayed, for century after century, as white.
Now, tell us WHY you decided to try and cross examine me?
Thanks.
I’m curious as to what race you think Jesus was and why.
I’m curious as to what race you think Jesus was and why.
Thats like asking what race is the tooth fairy.
Maybe, but JR seems certain that Jesus existed and wasn’t white.
Jesus is whatever race a Christian wants him to be. It’s all part of the farce that is Jesus.
I think there was a respected Roman and a respected Jewish historian that mentioned Christ and his death in their manuscripts.
Imagine if a human existed at any time in history who had magical powers to heal the sick, feed the masses, part the seas, etc etc, and the best historical evidence of his existence amounted to “I think there was a respected Roman and a respected Jewish historian that mentioned Christ and his death in their manuscripts.”
Meanwhile, extensive historical evidence is on record for many of his contemporaries, who would arguably be of less importance. I remember reading an article a while back where a trove of writings of that time period were discovered. After analysis it was determined that they were of mundane value, on the level of shopping lists. It challenged the notion that the main excuse for the universal lack of historical evidence for the existence of Jesus was ubiquitous illiteracy.
Exactly, and we've never found the body.
Because he was probably eaten by dogs like the rest of his contemporaries who were crucified for their crimes of the day.
Dogs eat farce?
The most likely thing to happen to Jesus’ body is that it would have just stayed on the cross for a couple of days. And while his body was up on that cross, it would have been fodder for scavengers - in fact, that was part of the point. There are numerous Roman writings attesting to the idea that they connected being crucified with being carrion. Here's a pretty evocative bit from Juvenal:
One of the leading proponents of this theory is John Dominic Crossan, a Christian scholar who is quite sure that Christ ended up as scavenger food. In fact, he says that if the dogs didn’t get Jesus when he was on the cross (Jesus would have been easier pickings for crows at that point), they would have gotten him when his defiled body was eventually taken down and thrown in a pit. That’s what happened to victims of crucifixion - they were just tossed in a hole. Maybe - maybe! - they had some lime sprinkled on top, but they very plausibly were just left for the wild dogs to come and consume. It's interesting to note that out of all the bodies discovered from antiquity we have only ever found perhaps one or two that could be identified as victims of crucifixion - the fact that such bodies are never found indicates that crucified people were not given decent burials that would allow their bones to stick together and not, perhaps, get toted off by dog.
So not a complete farce like the tooth fairy after all.
Not as I see it. If Jesus was just the average street preacher whose mouth got him in trouble, crucified and eaten by dogs then his supposed legacy is an enormous farce.
Was it called Palestine when Jesus was born?
The area was known as Canaan in antiquity though by Roman times also as Judea...
So not Palestine as JR stated in 2,
The area is in Israeli occupied Palestiian territory today. Nazareth and Bethlehem are cities not states. You understand this so why ask the dumb questions?
JR was speaking about the time of Jesus, not today.
I guess he's trying to claim there was no Palestine when Jesus was born, which is wrong.
I understand now, you meant the large geographic region, not the small political state.
No, you always understood finr [Deleted]
Removed for context - sandy
[Deleted]
This battle has been ongoing for centuries. The Egyptians are the most studied group in history. Cleopatra is said by some to be Macedonian Greek, which is nonsense since both the Greeks and Macedonians are separate groups through out history. The are volumes of historical books and modern-day scientific books on the race of the Egyptians and Cleopatra.
The sad thing is that more time is spent trying to prove her race than is given to her many accomplishments.
I can’t figure out why it matters so much to some people.
Lol .....hello Pandora!
Looks Greek, Arab, Mediterranean Jew or Egyptian to me.
There was a controversy at a local private Christian college, Biola University, about the appearance of Jesus in a mural painted by renowned muralist Kent Twitchell. The model for the image is my brother, who is not a Christian but was friends with the artist.
I have seen that mural, I had no idea it was your brother. A friend of mine was the city manager of LaMirada and he told me about it years ago and took me to see it.
He already had a beard and fairly long hair, but Twitchell asked him to let it grow longer for his studies for the mural.
After the mural was painted I used to joke about "My brother, the son of God".
Did he play basketball ?
He did and he had a great hook shot, unstoppable.
That's funny. Actually, he did play basketball. That was his life. He was on a high school basketball team that went to the city finals.
Believe it or not, he was a small forward and an excellent shooter. He even played JV Basketball at UCLA for a little while under Coach Wooden, back in the days when there was such a thing as JV Basketball. When we were growing up he spent most of his time shooting baskets. I don't remember him having much of a hook shot, though. And, no miracles.
He is 3 years younger than me.
He sure looks the part, lol.
Are Egyptians - Africans? Curious.
Racists outside of the USA, no way.
The European view was that a society as sophisticated as ancient Egypt could not have come from Africa, this was true with most Europeans the Germans among them. It was, IMO, much easier for them to explain that the Egyptians were white rather than black to satisfy their own prejudices.
It was in the early 20th century that some black journalists including W.E.B. Dubois challenged the white Egyptian mantra and Senegalese scientists through his works moved Egypt back to Africa. Even Budge a noted Egyptologist came to the conclusion that the Egyptian language was not Semitic but from African roots.
It's well worth researching and reading about Egypt and the battles to entrench in one world or the other.
My own opinion after reading many books and studies on it was that Cleopatra was mixed blood. There are some other recent DNA studies that are quite interesting as well.
What's. . . 'fun'-ny. . .is you can get 'light' and 'white' skin shades from mixing with Black people. Which explains why in this country's past history we find record of some Whites using the one 'drop' (1/16th rule) of African blood rule to determine who was officially black and officially white.
Thus, two black people can (incrementally) create a 'white' person.
But, can two 'white' people create a black person? That is a good question!
Also, it is interesting that in Cleopatra's time, people did not think of themselves as having 'racial' characteristics they were desperate to keep separate or use for nefarious reasons.
Yes, this non-scientific construct was started by scientists in the 18 Century and continued thru the progressive eugenics movement in the early 20th Century USA to Hitler in the mid 20 Century.
Now with DNA and genetic research, we know that there isn’t DNA boundary lines between races. But governments are determined to continue using these discredited bins.
I would accuse those earlier scientists of being more motivated by profit than science but we know scientists don’t operate that way.
From everything that I've read about Egypt, color did not make a difference. At one point in their history, there were ''Black Pharaohs''.
Recent DNA studies show an interesting situation. Modern Egyptians have 8% more African DNA than the ancient Egyptians.
Another interesting fact about ancient Egypt is the copious amounts of cocaine found in three and four thousand year old mummies. Cocaine was not grown in Egypt, nor anywhere outside the Western hemisphere. This would seem to be proof of prehistoric trade with the Americas...
Those mummies died with a cocaine addiction. It was the end of the line for them.
They died addicted but not from addiction.
This is really interesting when it was first discovered the scientist was laughed at by the scientific community, later with more sophisticated tests it proved true again, and then in the early 1990s with even more sophisticated tests, it proved to be true again.
A trade route between Egypt and the Western world, impossible they say, but they have said impossible many times before and the impossible has proven to be accurate.
The pyramids of Egypt and the pyramids of Peru and Central America the mummies of Egypt and the mummies of Peru. Could it be there was trade routes that we simply don't believe could have existed? IMO, of course.
What’s most surprising to me is that the Egyptians left many written records, but we haven’t found any of this important trade.
One would think that there would be written records but there could have been from the Indigenous of the Americas, Mixtex, Aztec and Mayan all their books were destroyed by the Spanish and the RCC. I believe on five codices survived the idiots of the Church and Spain.
What does DNA evidence reveal.
Whatever Cleopatra's ethnicity or combinations of, she obviously had all the wits and whiles needed to entrance the Roman hierarchy of the time and the Empire had expanded to the point where the exotic ruled what beauty was to be found in the beholder's eye.
The snarky 1st comment posted on this seed should be deservingly ignored.
I ignore all of his comments and whining.
Some are just attention seeking and the only ones making comments on their own 'articles' decrying the lack of other commenters.
lol