NYTimes: An infanticide that no one can see is also going to attract suspicion.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > NYTimes: An infanticide that no one can see is also going to attract suspicion.

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Oneiros: Jan 12, 2007

on the one hand the gdr cruelly oppressed nazis and kept them from exercising their god given rights to denim and rock and roll. on the other the u.s was brutally murdering black liberation leaders and heading towards a full-on race war. it's impossible to say which was worse

# ? May 11, 2023 02:50

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# ? Jun 7, 2024 22:32

Dreylad: Jun 19, 2001

few understand that Goodbye Lenin is actually a horror movie

# ? May 11, 2023 04:22

Wraith of J.O.I.: Jan 25, 2012

gdr flag was so much sicker than west germany�s

# ? May 11, 2023 05:00

H.P. Hovercraft: Jan 12, 2004; one thing a computer can do that most humans can't is be sealed up in a cardboard box and sit in a warehouse; Slippery Tilde

KOTEX GOD OF BLOOD posted:

its funny, I think cspam goons helped to popularize the use of the pejorative "bootlicker"

that is funny

# ? May 11, 2023 05:03

The Oldest Man: Jul 28, 2003

i contend that cspam has never helped popularize anything

depopularize maybe

# ? May 11, 2023 05:15

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

Dreylad posted:

few understand that Goodbye Lenin is actually a horror movie

i saw that movie back when i was a lib and liked it. i shant be watching it again

# ? May 11, 2023 07:05

Tankbuster: Oct 1, 2021

whats the movie about.

# ? May 11, 2023 07:09

Private Cumshoe: Feb 15, 2019; AAAAAAAGAGHAAHGGAH

the fall of the berlin wall and a cute german boy on a quest to find west german pickles close enough to the east german ones and change the label to trick his mom into thinking east germany was still intact because she slipped into a coma when poo poo went south

# ? May 11, 2023 07:11

Grognan: Jan 23, 2007; by Fluffdaddy

Aren't there like entire fetlife circles about boots and the proper care of?

# ? May 11, 2023 07:12

Jose: Jul 24, 2007; Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster and writer

Kate Andrews is an American who worked for romney

https://twitter.com/NesrineMalik/status/1656549778728075265?t=z4PTjYvCTjuLGZsjCf9EwA&s=19

# ? May 11, 2023 07:45

Kitfox88: Aug 21, 2007; Anybody lose their glasses?

The Oldest Man posted:

i contend that cspam has never helped popularize anything

depopularize maybe

wrong we helped make Berniebros real

though that was also mostly taintrunners work irl

# ? May 11, 2023 08:01

Weka: May 5, 2019; That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.

I was pleasantly surprised to find out recently that life expectancy in the Solomon Islands is 66 years.

# ? May 11, 2023 08:04

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

quote:

The new Netflix docudrama series �Queen Cleopatra,� produced and narrated by Jada Pinkett Smith, has already elicited a passionate response, though perhaps not the kind that publicists hoped for. Since news broke that the series would star the British actress Adele James, fans, Egyptologists, scholars of Greco-Roman antiquity and Arab and Greek news outlets have been debating whether the series willfully distorts history. The reason? �Queen Cleopatra� depicts the legendary monarch as Black.

Cleopatra, who died in 30 B.C., remains a source of pride for disparate communities. Many contemporary Egyptians view her as a key figure in the preservation of their history and even as a role model for contemporary Egyptian women. Greeks have also claimed her, noting that she was of Macedonian and Greek descent.

Depictions of Cleopatra with darkly pigmented skin date back at least hundreds of years. A 14th-century chronicle depicts her in a kind of charcoal gray. Scholars have long debated whether certain references in Shakespeare�s �Antony and Cleopatra� suggest that the playwright believed she had dark skin. In contemporary American pop culture, the assertion is often stated as fact, with her characterized as a beautiful and powerful Black African queen, her name commonly referred to as such in hip-hop.

�Queen Cleopatra,� however, has touched an international nerve. The debate around the docudrama escalated when an Egyptian lawyer called for Egyptian authorities to censure Netflix, accusing it of misrepresenting �Egyptian identity.� Zahi Hawass, a former minister of antiquities for Egypt, also entered the fray, claiming that a �falsehood� stands �at the heart of this series.� Cleopatra�s �first language was Greek,� he wrote in an essay for Arab News, �and in contemporary busts and portraits she is depicted clearly as being white.�

What debates like this miss is that current notions of race are relatively recent inventions and do not necessarily speak to how people of Cleopatra�s day saw the world or themselves. Classicists tell us that although the Greeks and Romans did notice skin color, they did not regard it as the primary marker of racial difference. Other concepts � environment, geography, ancestral origin, language, religion, custom and culture � played bigger roles in delineating groups and identities. So regardless of the material a sculptor may have chosen to use to summon Cleopatra�s powerful visage, there is no meaningful sense in which she � or anyone else of her era � would have identified as white.

The question that follows is: How, then, can anyone, including a Netflix dramatization, claim that Cleopatra was Black?

Netflix�s casting was informed by the views of Shelley Haley, a renowned classicist and Cleopatra expert, who claims that, although evidence of her ancestry and physical attributes are inconclusive, Cleopatra was culturally Black.

Dr. Haley has said that she was struck by the experience, early in her life and career, of encountering Black American communities that seemed to view Cleopatra as one of their own. Building on that experience, Dr. Haley�s academic work on Cleopatra adopts a more complex criterion for racial identification than skin color alone. �When we say, in general, that the ancient Egyptians were Black and, more specifically, that Cleopatra was Black,� Dr. Haley wrote, �we claim them as part of a culture and history that has known oppression and triumph, exploitation and survival.�

Her point is that we are not limited to considering only representations of what Cleopatra looked like or descriptions of her ancestry. We can also use what we know of her life, reign and resistance to understand her race as a shared cultural identity.

So what exactly do we know?

Cleopatra�s father, Ptolemy XII, was a member of the family that conquered Egypt over 200 years earlier. He was routinely referred to as an illegitimate child. His mother is unknown, as is the identity of Cleopatra�s mother, though several clues suggest she may have been Egyptian, including Plutarch�s claim that Cleopatra was likely the first Ptolemaic ruler to speak that language.

When the Roman poet Propertius famously called Cleopatra a whore queen (meretrix regina), he laced his misogynist tirade with allusions to Egypt, such as the �noxious� city of Alexandria and the �yapping� Egyptian god Anubis. The intersection of Cleopatra�s race and gender resulted in a form of oppression that cast her heritage and sexuality as particularly dangerous. Regardless of her lineage or appearance, it�s clear that Cleopatra�s actions were not perceived as the typical behavior of a Greek or Roman woman.

Throughout her reign, Cleopatra was also careful not to depict herself as a wife or consort but rather as Isis, the great Egyptian goddess who raised her son alone, without her slain husband, Osiris. Cleopatra was a pragmatist, doing what it took to survive, aligning herself first with Caesar, then with Mark Antony, before fleeing Actium when the tides turned. Finally, when it became clear to her that Octavian would let her live only in order to march her through Rome as a war captive, she took her own life by poison.

Dr. Haley argues that Cleopatra�s experience was part of a history of oppression of Black women. Reclaiming Cleopatra as Black and choosing to portray her now as a Black woman highlights this history � and is consistent with contemporary Egyptians or Greeks identifying with Cleopatra on the grounds of their own shared culture. Unlike racial assignments based on physical characteristics, which seek to distill people into rigid and recognizable categories, shared cultural claims can easily coexist.

To recognize Cleopatra as culturally Black is not to pretend that skin color is meaningless now � in the manner of recent figures like Rachel Dolezal and Jessica Krug, who claimed a cultural identity that was not theirs. In our society, race and racism are deeply entwined with skin color and other inherited physical traits. We cannot understand modern forms of oppression without understanding how phenotypical difference contributes to them, and we cannot legitimately claim a racial history without having lived it.

Cleopatra lived it. And it�s that experience, not her physical attributes, that should determine how we imagine her life.

are you loving serious with this poo poo

# ? May 11, 2023 08:08

Tankbuster: Oct 1, 2021

See I told you. Told you that the entire existence of american high culture is consuming the past of the entirety of human culture and turning it into burgerpunk dreck. Its why lily white ukranians with 1488 spinny wheel tattoos suddenly become coded black even as they leave african and south asian students to be stuck in the middle of a war zone.

Tankbuster has issued a correction as of 08:14 on May 11, 2023

# ? May 11, 2023 08:10

fart simpson: Jul 2, 2005; DEATH TO AMERICA

gradenko_2000 posted:

are you loving serious with this poo poo

theyre right. cleopatra had to deal with the exact same discrimination and prejudice as modern african americans deal with today

# ? May 11, 2023 08:25

Toplowtech: Aug 31, 2004

gradenko_2000 posted:

are you loving serious with this poo poo

Wasn't Ptolemaic Egypt a highly segregated kingdom ruled by a bunch of super-incestuous Macedonian noble? "Culturaly Black", surely. Wu Zetian was probably "culturally black". Empress Josephine de Beauharmais too i guess. (and napoleon left her for a white girl!!!!). Let's black face all of history, it sure costs less than stopping the cops from killing black kids.

# ? May 11, 2023 08:29

Oneiros: Jan 12, 2007

[nixon, muttering] jesus christ

# ? May 11, 2023 08:31

Ghost Leviathan: Mar 2, 2017; Can't post for 19 hours!

Toplowtech posted:

Wasn't Ptolemaic Egypt a highly segregated kingdom ruled by a bunch of super-incestuous Macedonian noble? "Culturaly Black", surely. Wu Zetian was probably "culturally black". Empress Josephine de Beauharmais too i guess. (and napoleon left her for a white girl!!!!). Let's black face all of history, it sure costs less than stopping the cops from killing black kids.

Cleopatra VII was literally the first of her family to actually learn the languages Egyptians spoke.

# ? May 11, 2023 08:34

Private Cumshoe: Feb 15, 2019; AAAAAAAGAGHAAHGGAH

Civ 3 Cleopatra looked pretty black

Black Cleopatra ain't new

# ? May 11, 2023 08:37

yellowcar: Feb 14, 2010

lmao this is just being a hotep with fresh new paint of wokescold idpol

# ? May 11, 2023 08:38

Oneiros: Jan 12, 2007

if the american experience isn't universal than how could any these fail children who don't even speak the predominate language of the country they're covering offer any meaningful insight into what's going on there? checkmate, tankies

# ? May 11, 2023 08:46

Toplowtech: Aug 31, 2004

Private Cumshoe posted:

Civ 3 Cleopatra looked pretty black

Black Cleopatra ain't new

No, it's not new. I still find the cultural appropriation of a first century BC Macedonian princess pretty weird. I guess some people can not conceptualize the Roman rejection of Cleopatra outside a black skin hatred reaction. Wonder how Egyptian people feel about North American rewriting their history to their needs. I mean they had to deal with centuries of European doing that poo poo already.

yellowcar posted:

lmao this is just being a hotep with fresh new paint of wokescold idpol

Pretty much.

# ? May 11, 2023 08:47

Goa Tse-tung: Feb 11, 2008; ;3; Yams Fan

Private Cumshoe posted:

Civ 3 Cleopatra looked pretty black

Black Cleopatra ain't new

she has a light skin in 6 again, but then they later released Ptolemaic Cleopatra

which has the same skin

# ? May 11, 2023 08:51

Private Cumshoe: Feb 15, 2019; AAAAAAAGAGHAAHGGAH

God drat Civ 6 sucks so much

# ? May 11, 2023 08:56

Orange Devil: Oct 1, 2010; Wullie's reign cannae smother the flames o' equality!

the bitcoin of weed posted:

what's that about uh the werewolves? is that right?

e: ok this is how i learn that Werewolves were a specific nazi stay-behind terrorism thing and not that the soviets were literally arresting people on suspicion of lycanthropy

Where do you think NATO got the idea for Gladio?

# ? May 11, 2023 08:57

WampaLord: Jan 14, 2010

We stan an oppressed queen

# ? May 11, 2023 08:57

Toplowtech: Aug 31, 2004

WampaLord posted:

We stan an oppressed queen

She literally had children with Julius "let me crucify you" Cesar and Marc "gently caress CICERO" Antony.

# ? May 11, 2023 09:02

Ghost Leviathan: Mar 2, 2017; Can't post for 19 hours!

Toplowtech posted:

No, it's not new. I still find the cultural appropriation of a first century BC Macedonian princess pretty weird. I guess some people can not conceptualize the Roman rejection of Cleopatra outside a black skin hatred reaction. Wonder how Egyptian people feel about North American rewriting their history to their needs. I mean they had to deal with centuries of European doing that poo poo already.

I do get that people take their heroes where they can get them and history's pretty scant on queens that get to do anything, but it really does get cringe.

Also you'd think it'd be easy enough- Cleopatra was a woman, a foreigner and a queen of a powerful potential rival to an empire that's extremely patriarchal and historically has spent decades and entire fleets and legions making sure any potential rivals are burned to the ground.

# ? May 11, 2023 09:23

Weka: May 5, 2019; That child totally had it coming. Nobody should be able to be out at dusk except cars.

Tankbuster posted:

See I told you. Told you that the entire existence of american high culture is consuming the past of the entirety of human culture and turning it into burgerpunk dreck. Its why lily white ukranians with 1488 spinny wheel tattoos suddenly become coded black even as they leave african and south asian students to be stuck in the middle of a war zone.

Going to go on Ukrainian telegraph and say this.

# ? May 11, 2023 10:04

euphronius: Feb 18, 2009

I don�t think Roman nobles rejected her until way later after she sided with Antonius in the civil war against Caesar Augustus.

euphronius has issued a correction as of 11:19 on May 11, 2023

# ? May 11, 2023 11:14

Pistol_Pete: Sep 15, 2007; Oven Wrangler

The best portrayal of Cleopatra was of course in HBO's Rome, where she's played as a messed-up junkie piece of eurotrash.

# ? May 11, 2023 11:17

my bony fealty: Oct 1, 2008

Toplowtech posted:

She literally had children with Julius "let me crucify you" Cesar and Marc "gently caress CICERO" Antony.

Caesar and Antony were both black.

# ? May 11, 2023 11:21

bedpan: Apr 23, 2008

didn't the sudanese run egypt for a few hundred years? surely there are lots of great stories of powerful, successful africans during that time

# ? May 11, 2023 11:23

forkboy84: Jun 13, 2012; Corgis love bread. And Puro

Weka posted:

Going to go on Ukrainian telegraph and say this.

Why would anyone willingly go out of their way to engage with Nazis OP? That's a silly idea.

Toplowtech posted:

She literally had children with Julius "let me crucify you" Cesar and Marc "gently caress CICERO" Antony.

In fairness, Cicero seems like he'd have been utterly insufferable to be around. Dude sucked so much that all-time most influential psychopath Augustine credits the Hortensius with influencing his conversion to Christianity. Engels was right: "the most contemptible scoundrel in history"

# ? May 11, 2023 11:23

euphronius: Feb 18, 2009

Cicero was awful, just the worst.

# ? May 11, 2023 11:24

gradenko_2000: Oct 5, 2010; HELL SERPENT; Lipstick Apathy

Pistol_Pete posted:

The best portrayal of Cleopatra was of course in HBO's Rome, where she's played as a messed-up junkie piece of eurotrash.

I like how in Assassin's Creed Origins the protagonist gets propositioned by Cleopatra and he's so much of a wife guy that he turns her down

# ? May 11, 2023 11:25

bedpan: Apr 23, 2008

my bony fealty posted:

Caesar and Antony were both black.

famous roman general and politician scipio africanus was black, hence the name africanus. don't believe me? just look at depiction of him carved during his lifetime:

# ? May 11, 2023 11:25

Oneiros: Jan 12, 2007

bedpan posted:

famous roman general and politician scipio africanus was black, hence the name africanus. don't believe me? just look at depiction of him carved during his lifetime:

[pulls out my calipers]

# ? May 11, 2023 11:32

ArmedZombie: Jun 6, 2004

you can have a little black cleopatra, as a treat

# ? May 11, 2023 11:32

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# ? Jun 7, 2024 22:32

Cookie Cutter: Nov 29, 2020; Is there something else that's bothering you Mr. President?

Pistol_Pete posted:

The best portrayal of Cleopatra was of course in HBO's Rome, where she's played as a messed-up junkie piece of eurotrash.

Haha yes, from her very first scene she is just the biggest BPD art hoe in history, it's great

# ? May 11, 2023 11:34

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > C-SPAM > NYTimes: An infanticide that no one can see is also going to attract suspicion.

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