American Professor: "Cleopatra should be depicted as Black becuz she was oppressed and shiet. And because African Americans see her as such, which makes her culturally Black"

Netflix’s casting was informed by the views of Shelley Haley, a renowned classicist and Cleopatra expert, who claims that, although evidence of her ancestry and physical attributes are inconclusive, Cleopatra was culturally Black.

Dr. Haley has said that she was struck by the experience, early in her life and career, of encountering Black American communities that seemed to view Cleopatra as one of their own. Building on that experience, Dr. Haley’s academic work on Cleopatra adopts a more complex criterion for racial identification than skin color alone. “When we say, in general, that the ancient Egyptians were Black and, more specifically, that Cleopatra was Black,” Dr. Haley wrote, “we claim them as part of a culture and history that has known oppression and triumph, exploitation and survival.”

Her point is that we are not limited to considering only representations of what Cleopatra looked like or descriptions of her ancestry. We can also use what we know of her life, reign and resistance to understand her race as a shared cultural identity.

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To recognize Cleopatra as culturally Black is not to pretend that skin color is meaningless now — in the manner of recent figures like Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, who claimed a cultural identity that was not theirs. In our society, race and racism are deeply entwined with skin color and other inherited physical traits. We cannot understand modern forms of oppression without understanding how phenotypical difference contributes to them, and we cannot legitimately claim a racial history without having lived it.