Cleopatra Hamliton

Here's a still from the new Netflix series on Cleopatra.

Cleopatra's lineage is well known. She was a descendant of Ptolemy, one of Alexander the Great's generals. She was Greek, not black.

Alexander Hamilton and the other Founding Fathers of America were whites. They were not black.

Meanwhile, at the time of Cleopatra and at the time of Alexander Hamilton, West Africa was home to sophisticated and powerful empires. It wasn't just the threat of African diseases that kept the Portuguese, Dutch and English from establishing more than trading posts on the coast. There was no way the European powers of the time were going to force their will on the Africans.

Why all the blackfacing in historical dramas? I think both Cleopatra and Hamilton are profoundly racist art. They turn the actors and actresses into organ grinder monkeys, dressing them up like Egyptian royalty or American aristocrat-revolutionaries. In the absence of big-budget productions dealing with the West African empires, it's like Hollywood is telling us, "See? Black people could have been just as white as those other people from history!" It's like there aren't any African stories to tell because ...

Because what? Because the Africans were subordinate to Europeans? Because they didn't accomplish as much? Because they were unsophisticated? None of that is true. What is it that prevents those stories from being told?

As far as I can figure out, the problem is precisely that there was no way the European powers of the time were going to force their will on the Africans. The slave trade was mutual. The Europeans weren't buying slaves on the cheap, they were dealing with shrewd operators. It's not like the Africans didn't know what was going to happen to the slaves, either. They'd been in that business for a long, long time.

The progs run Hollywood and they can't tell that story. If they did, we'd all see how similar we are. Aztecs enslaved. Whites enslaved. Blacks enslaved. The whole narrative of colonialism / imperialism / white supremacy /  patriarchy would collapse. It's not that the Euros were more evil than everyone else, it's that they had something that allowed them to out-compete everyone else.

Christianity, Too

Why didn't the Aztecs or Africans ditch slavery before the Europeans forced them to do it? Why did the Euros ditch it at all when no one else did?

We know the answer to that question and it's another story the progs can't tell.