The ‘Queen Cleopatra’ Uproar Explained
18.05.2023 - 05:33
/ thewrap.com
Racism“Queen Cleopatra” focuses on many of the things people know about her. Her rise to power in Egypt, her deft political and social maneuvering, and the dangerous alliances and relationships she struck in her efforts to gain and keep power, and keep Egypt independent from Rome.
This culminates with her entering Rome’s many civil wars on the side of her lover, Marc Antony, which ended with her death in 31 B.C. by suicide after Antony’s rival, Octavian, utterly defeated them.
The show adopts a revisionist historical take on the monarch, depicting her as a Black woman, played by actress Adele James. Which means you can probably guess the sad direction this is headed.Even before the show came out, it was subjected to an avalanche of hateful remarks.
The problem was so bad that Netflix was forced to turn off comments on the trailer’s YouTube page. And James herself was subjected to racist harassment, screenshots of which she posted on Twitter in April.
Similarly racist sentiments about James and the show can be easily found on Twitter — we won’t link to that though — yet another example of the rise in hate speech on the platform since it was purchased by Elon Musk. Audience scores on Rotten Tomatoes are harder to nail down — the site has much stricter content policies than Twitter does, thanks to a vicious sexist harassment campaign directed against a female film critic who gave “Marvel’s The Avengers” a mediocre score back in 2012.In response to the backlash against the trailer, Tina Gharavi, the series’ director, asked viewers and historians in a Variety op-ed, “what bothers you so much about a Black Cleopatra?” Gharavi argued that James looks more like Cleopatra than Elizabeth Taylor did, though she too portrayed the
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