Cleopatra
For a while I’ve been a fan of the webpage, Racebending, their blog and their Tumblir account. Occasionally there are times I wonder if they are overreacting about some of the subjects they bring up but then I remind myself that I’m thinking as a sheltered white boy who wouldn’t even notice the worst of these things.
Last week they had a link to a list of famous examples of minority characters being “whitefaced” in Hollywood. Most were in the list were the ones you would expect most notably John Wayne as Genghis Khan, Charlton Heston as the Mexican Detective Mike Vargas in A Touch of Evil and many more. The one item on their list that surprised me was Elizabeth Taylor as Cleopatra it went into some detail about how this was an example of having a white woman playing one of the most famous women of color in history.
Immediately I went into history Nazi mode. “Hey wait a minute,” I said, “Cleopatra was Macedonian! The Ptolemys virtually invented apartheid…” In other words she shouldn’t be on the list.
But then it hit me. The creators of the film probably didn’t know this either. This was the story of the exotic oriental Queen who seduced both Ceaser and Mark Anthony from the Shakespeare play not Cleopatra VII last of the Ptolemy Dynasty. So based on this, the article’s criticism holds and is very, very valid.
