Angelina Jolie Proves That Obama Still Isn't Black
Ta-Nehisi Coates, at The Atlantic, makes a point about the never-ending annoyance of America's race obsession. We forget that the rest of the world doesn't come at race the way we do. Not always better, not always worse. Just different. He missed a salient addition though.
The base issue is Angelina Jolie snagging the role of Cleopatra.
Yeah, I slickied his photo because he's right in saying that lots of us grew up with this trying-way-too-hard reimagining of world history. Though her mother is unknown, Cleopatra was Greek, certainly as that was understood then. She didn't look anymore like this sister than Jesus looks like Peter Frampton.
TNC writes: "..., I don't think the problem here is that Angelina Jolie plays women--in the very limited context of America--might not be seen as white. The problem is that my sense is that there really aren't many nonwhite women even in the discussions. Thus my questions would not so much be for the casting directors, but for the business as a whole, and for the people who support the business."
The movie business is what it is and the answer has got to be, while also working from within, to develop our own movie studios, etc. a la (squirm) Tyler Perry and (god help me) Ice Cube. I'm endorsing neither of these 'artistes,' just their refusal to pick up a bull horn rather than a movie camera.
I stole TNC's photo and now I'm stealing his point: Jolie playing Cleopatra is a much less salient example of white chauvinism than her having portrayed Mariane Pearl, Daniel Pearl's widow, in A Mighty Heart. I waited, in vain, for the afrosphere to rise up in fury at the obviously Negroid heroine being played by the uber white girl.
Instead, the lack of more than a scattered response surprised me. It also helped prove my point that, in America, Obama -- and any blacks of non-American-slavery era stock -- are not 'black'. Had Mariane Pearl been so, theatres would have been burning like matchbooks as black America lost its mind.
(Here's the link to my infamous Obama Isn't Black piece. My URL insertion thingee continues to annoy.
Pearl is Afro-Cuban-French or some such, was born and has lived most of her life overseas. She's an out-of-context Negro (Colbert suggested 'late to the scene' blacks, which also proves my point) and not useful in our Sharpton vs. the GOP death struggle. Were 'blacks' like Pearl, or pre-mortem Amadou Diallo/Abner Louima to get the mike, there's simply no telling what they'd say about race. Most horribly, they'd probably not get to race for a real long time, instead wanting to talk about black on 'black' crime, entrepreneurship, immigration and the like. They're our own internal 'three-fifths': counted to bump up our numbers, and cause they might get police-shot and make a good photo op, but their opinions, their preferences? If they don't gibe with the 'black' agenda (and I believe they won't), they're silenced.
Race is a social construction and, in America, Mariane Pearl is constructed out. She will be until black America outgrows its own existential struggle to reconcile the past ("the scene" --slavery and Jim Crow-- that Colbert intuitively recognized as that which makes us 'black') with the present. When we stop seeing ourselves through whites' eyes ("I'm black because white women clutch their purses at sight of me." "You're black because whites decreed that having any African DNA makes you so.") --that's when we'll finally be free.
Two final notes: 1) I think the western world colluded in deciding not to 'see' Pearl's non-whiteness. This is also known as "transcending race," i .e. code for forgiveness for your degraded racial state once you've achieved a certain status. (want proof: what white has ever had to transcend race?). Having a husband beheaded by Islamofascists was just too important to ignore, she's not very Negroid and European to boot. Hence, little discussion of her mixed race.
2) Sigh. I know what a waste of time this is. I am critiquing our social construction of race, not endorsing it. I just think that labels ought to illuminate more than they obscure and 'black' fails that test. Don't try to tell me that you'd meet a Nigerian cab driver or a Jamaican with long 'locks and lilting accent, then describe them to others as merely "black". I also think that our construction of 'blackness' is an insult to blacks (defining us by our relationship to whites) and an even bigger insult to ethnic blacks. Being from Kenya is not being from Detroit. Blacks, if no one else, out to treasure, and validate, those differences.
Debra, I love you to death, but please, please, please let go of your "Obama's not like us" routine.
Here we have a smart, wonderfully successful BLACK man who wants (wants!)to be part of "us" and you turn up your nose because his ancestors didn't come over via the Middle Passage? It's ludicrous and self-defeating, and you are far too smart to not realize that.
I’m not inside your head, but admit it: you would not have made those silly statements (at least not in public) if you thought he had a snowballs chance in hell of actually winning.
So instead of doubling down and defending the indefensible, why don’t you just admit that you were wrong, and that the Black, African-American, Negro, whatever-you-want-to-call-it community is a big enough tent to include brother Barack...and move on.
I’m glad to see you are getting your life back in order, and I wish you the best.
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Ok, Debra. I can get where you are coming from on this. My maternal family is mixed race "creole" origin. We do indeed have our "own" sort of culture customs etc. But overall we view ourselves as others do, as light-skinned black folk. Even though Cleopatra may have been mixed race, Greek whatever, the argument for me is that she was indeed an Egyptian queen. I would be a lot less offended by the whitewashing of history if they at least cast someone a little more historically accurate. I have seen plenty of Greek women and none of them look like Angelina Jolie. I think Hollywood sees her as having an "ethnic" look because of her lips. My aunt has been an actress for years struggling to make it big and turned down for numerous jobs because her look was not "ethnic" enough. Her one pretty big role was playing the mulatto, drug addicted daughter with one-blue eye on "The Heat of the Night" special. I don't know how Cleopatra looked since I wasn't there, but I'm pretty sure given the climate in Egypt, she was no where near Angelina Jolie's complexion! I hate that Egyptian's represented themselves as brown people with big noses and Hollywood represents them as tanned white people. Egypt is in Africa, that's all I'm saying!!
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Chinue: Egyptians represented themselves as many different things, because Egypt was diverse. They were not uniformly represented as "brown people with big noses" and in fact their art clearly makes a distinction between people we would today see as Black, and people we would not. Whatever she may have been, if we saw Cleopatra on the street today, we would probably not identify her as a Black woman. Roman diplomats described her as "fair" and having brown hair.
Egypt is in Africa, but look at WHERE in Africa it is. Egypt was a crossroads of the world, comparable to NYC today: it was much more related, in terms of commerce and travel, to Asia and Europe than to southern Africa.
Portraits of Cleopatra indicate that she had a larger nose, but otherwise it's possible that she looked a lot like Angelina Jolie. This isn't a case of whiteface.
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