The controversy over Netflix’s new four-part documentary Queen Cleopatra has been portrayed as a backlash to diversity in casting. “Diverse casting often attracts heated backlash online (like the ridiculous reaction to The Little Mermaid remake), but usually the controversy comes from reactionary spaces like ‘anti-woke’ YouTube,” wrote Dani Di Placido in Forbes, before noting that in this case, backlash had also come from the Egyptian government. In The Guardian, Leila Latif said, “the idea that you need a white actor [to portray Cleopatra] is utterly insidious.” And actress Adele James, who portrayed Cleopatra in the docuseries, commented, “The only thing I can say about [Cleopatra’s background] is that we just don’t know. There are versions of Cleopatra that exist already with actresses in that role who are fairer skinned than I am, but I think I have every right to have a shot at humanizing this incredible woman.” In much of the discourse surrounding Queen Cleopatra, its defenders have portrayed the casting of a black actress as either Hamilton-esque race-blindness or a DEI move to give more women of color acting jobs. But the docuseries itself makes it clear that it was neither.

“I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black,” says Shelley P. Haley, Professor of Classics at Hamilton College, just two minutes into the docuseries, recounting a conversation she had with her grandmother as a child. Professor Haley later claims that, in a set of recurring dreams, she was visited by Cleopatra, who told her, “You have to tell my story, you have to do it.” At one point in the docuseries, Shelly says, “We just don’t know,” with regards to Cleopatra’s well-documented Greek and Persian ethnic background; later, she says that Cleopatra is an “African queen, and that’s been buried, it’s been erased, it’s been white-washed.” Haley’s commentary makes it abundantly clear that casting a black actress was an explicit move meant to rectify what she and, assumedly, the producers, see as a “white-washing of history.”

It extends far beyond casting Adele James. It’s not just Cleopatra who’s black, but also her family and the entire Ptolemaic court. There’s just one notable exception: Pothinus, the scheming eunuch who turns Cleopatra’s brother-husband Ptolemy XIII against her, is portrayed by Michael Greco — a white actor. The casting decisions in Cleopatra weren’t race-blind, they were race-bait.

The docuseries’ hagiographic approach to its subject turns Cleopatra into a hotep caricature, swaying seductively to drumbeats in dangly jewelry and white linens. At times, the emphasis on Cleopatra as a confident and self-assured BLACK QUEEN™ feels like a racist parody — she’s reduced time and time again to the position of a single mother pursuing support and recognition from neglectful white baby-daddies Julius Caesar and Mark Anthony.

If one can get through Shelly P. Haley’s racial commentary, the obvious race-baity choices in casting, and the incredibly corny monologues that Jada Pinkett-Smith delivers at the beginning of every episode in long-housed Toyotathon announcer cadence, it's not half bad. Put another way, the series is only good in the sense that Cleopatra’s life story is inherently interesting. But I’d recommend a book instead.

-River Page