Interesting to look at just how far we’ve come and how far we haven’t. In sports and other places, Donald Trump has become a pariah, which is nothing unexpected. He attended the Knicks vs. Spurs basketball finals last month, to the chagrin of a great number of people, including many New Yorkers who booed him lustily.
Predictably, that’s the only game the Knicks lost in those particular finals. Reportedly, he also expressed his number one support for Argentina and Lionel Messi in the finals of the just-completed World Cup, the most popular sport in the world. Argentina, of course, lost the game (and Messi, at the end, at least appeared to not even acknowledge Trump, as he accepted the loser’s trophy from Trump onstage.)
In another venue–new major movies–the old famous chestnut, Homer’s “The Odyssey“ has been redone and is showing at theaters now. The billionaire Elon Musk, Trump’s “friend,” is throwing a media ‘hissy fit’ at the movie’s casting of a Black woman, Academy winner Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy. Musk reportedly said publicly that that is like casting a Black man to play Abraham Lincoln or a white dude to play MLK.
Christopher Nolan, who won the Oscar for “Oppenheimer”– with the power and craftmanship of the star-studded artistic performances of a very large cast– has just released the new movie that may now become defined mainly by the racial arguments that will surely ensue, and not the artistry needed to make it a great film. Heaven forbid that Donald Trump decides to weigh in, as he probably will, even though he probably thinks Helen of Troy was a real historical figure rather than a well-known character in a classic fictional story.
The thing is, shouldn’t we be past all that by now? Well, we’re not. Remembering the very controversial and polarizing discussion of whether Cleopatra, the ancient queen of Egypt, should ever be cast as a Black woman, which last occurred in 2023’s Netflix eight-episode series, we should either be ready or get ready for a very rough ride. In that movie, actress Adele James, a Black British actress, played Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of the Ptolemaic dynasty in Egypt.
Actress Jada Pinkett Smith produced the movie and called it a historical docuseries. However, the Egyptian government loudly and fervently attacked it as a fraud, claiming Cleopatra was white and Greek rather than Black or African.
Though the available evidence fails to support the Egyptian government’s historical conclusions, and for most Black scholars it doesn’t really matter as some may think– “Who cares about Cleopatra?”– the event sparked significant controversy in Egypt and other parts of the world over the casting of a Black woman as the Egyptian queen.
So, here we go again. Not only do Black folk still have to prove their historical worth in the story of the U.S. (Trump’s administration constantly trying to rewrite history, which will exclude Black American significance in the Smithsonian and other U.S. museums), we still have to fight over depictions of famous fictional and historical entities that show Black brilliance and substance.
We can only hope that enough of our children have been prepared to continue the struggle for Black substance and recognition.
A Side Point: One leading white critic, a Mr. Walsh, pontificated the following point. In conclusion, this column has to ask, is it true? “We’re told that we shouldn’t object to Helen of Troy being portrayed as a black woman.” “And yet if a major Hollywood studio made a film set in Africa and cast a white woman as ‘the most beautiful woman in Africa,’ those same people would literally riot in the street. If, say, Sydney Sweeney was cast in the role, they’d be driven to murderous violence. We all know this is the case.” Do we really?
