Angelina Jolie as Cleopatra?! Hollywood...and White Audiences...don't change

Read Talia White's column in MSNBC's The Grio (and check my columns as well, fanboys & girls) then come back here.

Didn't the BBC do an investigation (in conjunction with Discovery) showing that through bone and DNA analysis (on her little sister Arsinoe--pronounced R-SIN-OH-WAY, and depicted in art with major plaited black braids of her own hair) this woman was more African than Ptolemy/Greek?

Note to you history-challenged jerks: Alexander the Great first severed Egypt from the Persian Empire (modern day Iran)...hence we have Alexandria. When he died, one of his best buds, the general Ptolemy, took Egypt as his little prize and made Alexandria his capital (and a repository of ancient art & technology while white folks were painting themselves with bull dung). Hence from that moment till the destruction of the dynasty by the Romans under Augustus, all Pharoahs were at least part Greek. That part diminished to a trickle. And far from being an exotic courtesan [which one would think would thus drive tools in Hollywood to pick someone who's maybe a Latina or with a "Middle Eastern/South Asian look" because that's the "type" cineplex suburban Americans expect] Cleo even as a teenager spoke 4 languages, was a mathmetician, poetess/comedienne and studied diplomacy from materials in the Great Library. She was a more a nerdy chick with a nice sex drive and a lot of ambition, not a scheming ho. But alas, most of that scheming involved killing a lot of folks, and it changed the course of Rome's, thus our, history...

Two years ago, archeologists found the body of Arsinoe (whom she had assassins kill once her old lover Julius Caesar died) and did the forensics. It works the same why as when they do a work up on your sibling, or parents' bodies to determine who/what the heck you are. And unless a Viking had an affair with Cleo's momma, the results and anecdotal/historical Roman (i.e. Plutarch) and Egyptian accounts should be conclusive.

But that don't bother Hollywood none. Somebody has to market to Red State morons...and go with brand names to ensure some semblence of a box office take. But that, interestingly, isn't the most cynical aspect to this. Like Liz Taylor et al...isn't Angelina...or Halle or any other black actress mentioned...too OLD? When Cleo met Caesar she was 16. She died at age 30, maybe? The closest to a decent and accurate rendering was HBO's Rome (more a precusor to Starz's Spartacus: Blood & Sand than 300). The chick still had a little too much Avril Lavigne in her, but also it was clear there was some sistah as well.

So let's stop the bullsh^t. I hear white people whining about Don Glover trying to be cast as Spider Man/Peter Parker, or huffing "Then let Spike Lee make the movie." That's not the point. The point is that Hollywood, as a weird carnie mirror to our society, has been doing the opposite to people of color for decades...indeed, since D.W. Griffith delighted audiences in 1915 by having white actors smeared on blackface to play the treacherous, rapacious, presumptuous, arrogant, not-knowing-their-place mulattoes of Birth of A Nation. Damn, those adjectives sound like Obama, don't it, Rand and Sarah? Guess we should get Fred Armisen in the film version?