A Cleopatra Note
by Chitown Kev
Let me be blunt about it.
I don’t really care who plays Cleopatra.
Gal Gadot’s starring role in a new telling of Cleopatra was criticized on social media just as soon as it was announced.
The Wonder Woman star confirmed Sunday that she’s teaming with the director of that film, Patty Jenkins, and Alexander screenwriter Laeta Kalogridis for the project. She noted that they planned to tell the story of the Egyptian queen in a way that hasn’t been done before, because it will be from the perspective of women. The most famous depiction of Cleopatra onscreen, of course, is Elizabeth Taylor’s take in the 1963 film of the same name written and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz.
First of all, before Cleopatra was anything else, she was Macedonian Greek and part of the Ptolemaic line of succession, no matter what her overall ethnic background was. For that matter, her overall ethnic background is unknown and in the Alexandria, Egypt of its day, the most cosmopolitan city in the world up to that time, it could have been anything.
And besides, however we consider matters of race/ethnicity to be nowadays, how we classify who is what race has nothing to do with what and how the peoples of that time thought of “race” (it’s one of the more fascinating things to study about classical antiquity).
Far as I’m concerned, Elizabeth Taylor was great in the role. Gal Gadot might be great playing Cleopatra. Or not. Lena Horne could have convincingly played the role, IMO, as well as Halle Berry or any number of actresses from a variety of ethnic backgrounds and with a variety of skin tones.
This “controversy” about who gets to “become” the last Queen of Egypt prior to its conquest by the eventual Emperor of Rome, Augustus Caesar, says more about our preoccupations nowadays than it says about Cleopatra, herself.
One thing I am sure of: The last and greatest of the Hellenistic queens will continue to beguile us for the next 2100 years every bit as much as she has beguiled us for the previous 2100 or so years.
For a host of reasons.
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NEWS ROUND UP BY DOPPER0189, BLACK KOS MANAGING EDITOR
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Philanthropist and co-CEO of Ariel Investments, Mellody Hobson, has gifted her alma mater Princeton University with a major donation to construct a new residential college on the site of one previously named after Woodrow Wilson.
This summer, the school’s Board of Trustees voted to remove Wilson’s name from the School of Public and International Affairs (which Hobson graduated from in 1991) as well as from the residential Wilson College, due to the former president’s documented racism. Among other things, Wilson championed the segregation of workers in federal agencies during his time in the White House.
Now his named residential college at Princeton will be replaced with one honoring Hobson, after the businesswoman and her Hobson/Lucas Family Foundation (which she established with her husband, Star Wars creator George Lucas) gave a lead gift to the University to begin building a new residential college at the Ivy League in 2023. It will be the first at the school to bear the name of a Black woman.
“My hope is that my name will remind future generations of students — especially those who are Black and brown and the ‘firsts’ in their families — that they too belong. Renaming Wilson College is my very personal way of letting them know that our past does not have to be our future,” said Hobson, in the official announcement from Princeton about her gift.
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As companies recognize the power of the African American dollar, they’re seeking out Black influencers like never before. Ozy: WHY MARKETERS ARE EMBRACING INFLUENCERS OF COLOR
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Jacent Wamala is a licensed marriage therapist servicing women of color. The Las Vegas native was surprised when she was approached for her first influencer campaign in 2018 — she had only 2,000 followers on Instagram at the time — and was compensated for it.
Little did Wamala know that the client’s interest in her was part of what is now the marketing industry’s next big hope for success: Black influencers.
As the U.S. economy battles to recover from a deep recession sparked by the coronavirus pandemic, and the country grapples with unrest following the killing of George Floyd, Black influencers are emerging as critical for marketers who are trying to target an African American audience that for decades was seen as secondary at best.
Trend and insight publication Another Insight listed only two microinfluencers of color among their top 40 microinfluencers — i.e., those with 5,000 to 15,000 followers on major social platforms — in 2016. Three years later, in 2019, the report listed 10 microinfluencers of color. The influencers span travel, food, lifestyle, fashion, fitness, motherhood and beauty. The growing market for influencers of color is evident, albeit less markedly, at the other end of the spectrum, with the biggest celebrity Instagram influencers in the world. Only two of the top 10 in this category were POC in 2017. In 2019, that number had doubled.
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The unrelenting protests, the supportive statements from white leaders nationwide, and the early momentum behind policing policy changes are all indications that this might be a turning point in our nation’s battle against racism. Will we seize this opportunity or will we lose momentum, showing once again that America can be “a 10-day nation” that moves on too easily to the next crisis, as Martin Luther King Jr. warned a fellow civil-rights activist in 1963?
My father, Emmett Rice, and I had hundreds of conversations about race and racism from the time I was a boy until a few weeks before he died, in 2011, at 91 years old. He was the most intellectually curious person I have ever known. He grew up in South Carolina in the Jim Crow era of the 1920s and ’30s. Despite losing his father when he was only 7, he graduated from college, served in World War II with the Tuskegee Airmen, earned a doctorate in economics, and became one of the seven governors of the Federal Reserve Board in the 1980s. Racism still chased him and burdened him every day of his life. So he armed me with the knowledge he’d amassed, in hopes I could do even more.
Thirty years ago, my dad gave me his playbook to put racism to rest, and it inspired me to dedicate my career to executing his vision. Dad’s playbook included one insight that all Americans should hear, at least those who hope that when it comes to addressing racism, we can do better. As an economist, he told me that we have to “increase the cost of racist behavior.” Doing so, he said, would create the conditions for black people to harness the economic power essential to changing the narrative in white America’s mind about race.
We can ratchet up that cost in several ways, starting today. The first step is to clarify what constitutes racist behavior. Defining it makes denying it or calling it something else that much harder. There are few things that white Americans fear more than being exposed as racist, especially when their white peers can’t afford to come to their defense. To be outed as a racist is to be convicted of America’s highest moral crime. Once we align on what racist behavior looks like, we can make those behaviors costly.
The most well-understood dimension involves taking actions that people of color view as overtly prejudiced—policing black citizens much differently than whites, calling the police on a black bird-watcher in Central Park who is asking you to obey the law, calling somebody the N-word to show them who is boss. This is racism in the first degree.
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Ezi Magbegor had formally met just one of her teammates and a couple of Seattle Storm executives before the rookie made the long journey from Australia to the U.S. to join the strangest season in WNBA history, in the league’s coronavirus-defying bubble in Florida.
A stellar athlete with great ball-handling skills, it was no surprise that the youngest player in the WNBA, at age 21 — American players must be at least 22 in their draft year — could find a home on the court. And for a league that’s defining itself as a hub for racial justice activism, Magbegor already knew the drill.
As someone whose family migrated from Nigeria to Australia when she was young, Magbegor has long faced the sting of racism. In addition to adjusting to a new culture, Magbegor felt undereducated on the history and marginalization of indigenous Australians, something she says is often swept under the rug in the country’s school system. The process of appreciating that history and bigotry has been a focus for her during this summer of global social change.
It came to a head when she participated in a practice strike by the Australian women’s national basketball team, the Opals, as protests following the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis hit a fever pitch across the world. The strike got results: Basketball Australia put together the RISE UP campaign to better support people of color in Australia, particularly Aboriginal folks and other indigenous groups. The team has asked to incorporate tribal flags in the design of its uniforms and hopes to work closely with local governments to fight institutionalized racism.
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The sounds and culture of Haiti served as a colorful backdrop for former vice president and Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden’s visit to Little Haiti Monday as he courted Haitian-American voters and leaders on the last day to register to vote in Florida.
“It’s all about the spirit, the spirit of this community,” Biden said. “There’s no quit in America. There’s clearly no quit in the Haitian community, there is none. And I promise you there would be no quit on my part as your president making sure that the Haitian community has an even shot and back on its feet.”
During an address lasting eight minutes, 46 seconds, Biden emphasized the need to have voters, including Haitian Americans, turn out and stressed issues that unite him and the crowd.
Biden told the small crowd if the turnout is the same as it was in 2016 when President Donald Trump, whose name he never once mentioned, ran against Democratic rival and former U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the Haitian-American community in Florida “by itself” has the potential of determining the outcome of the Nov. 3 presidential race.
“Wouldn’t it be an irony, an irony of all ironies,” Biden said, “if on election eve, it turned out Haitians literally delivered a coup de grâce in this election?”
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'If you're a young African-American, an immigrant, you can go anywhere in this state. You just need to be conservative, not liberal,' Sen. Lindsey Graham said in a candidate forum Friday. The Grio: Graham appears to imply Black liberals are not welcome in South Carolina
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On Friday, Lindsey Graham, the senior U.S. senator from South Carolina, appeared on a local news forum in lieu of a debate with Democratic candidate Jaime Harrison.
During the forum, Graham was asked about the civil unrest in the nation against the mistreatment of Black people in America. His answer implied that their safety depended on their political party affiliation.
“I care about everybody. If you’re a young African-American, an immigrant, you can go anywhere in this state. You just need to be conservative, not liberal,” Graham said in the forum on WLTX-19.
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