Wokery colonizes Egypt
‘Iremember my grandmother saying to me, ‘I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black.’” So says one of the voiceovers advertising a Netflix docuseries about powerful women. As a one-sentence summary of our current cultural moment, it is hard to beat. Lived experience trumps data, and “my truth” trumps verifiable fact — especially when it comes to race.
Oddly enough, the Egyptians don’t seem to have gotten the memo. They think that historical accuracy counts for more than what your grandmother told you, and the Netflix venture has met a storm of protest there from politicians and historians.
“Cleopatra was Greek,” says Zahi Hawass, an archaeologist who served as Egypt’s antiquities minister. “She was blonde, not black.”
This raises an intriguing question. Is it OK to force our culture on Egyptians when we do so in the name of woke values? In general, the politically correct line on Egypt is that it has bravely struggled against a succession of Western colonialists who have sought to impose their values — most recently, the French, the British, and the Americans.
But not, it seems, when the imposition of American values involves strong women and racial empowerment. Then we’re all for Afrocentrism, and we play along with the claim that the pyramids were built by Wakandans.
Obviously, people are free to believe whatever wacky conjectures they like. Louis Farrakhan, a proponent of the black pharaohs theory, argues that “white supremacy caused Napoleon to blow the nose off the Sphinx because it reminded you too much of the black man’s majesty.”
The historical record tells us that the Sphinx had lost its nose hundreds of years earlier. It tells us, through DNA taken from their mummified remains, that ancient Egyptians were genetically closer to Europeans than to sub-Saharan Africans. And it tells us that Cleopatra was descended, through a long line of men called Ptolemy, from a Macedonian bodyguard of Alexander the Great, who seized Egypt when the great emperor died. Cleopatra, bluntly, looked more like Elizabeth Taylor than the actress playing her on Netflix. But who cares about any of this next to the imperative of “my truth”?
We in the Anglosphere are used to a certain asymmetry in casting. We know that we are supposed to nod along approvingly when a black actress plays Anne Boleyn, but to object furiously to the idea of a white actress playing, say, Rosa Parks. We expect the hypothesis that the pyramids were built by black pharaohs to be received more politely than the hypothesis that they were built by aliens from another solar system — a theory for which there is neither more nor less evidence.
Ordinary Egyptians, by sticking to the historical truth, raise an awkward question: Is our approach more sophisticated than theirs or simply less honest?
The most absurd thing about modern wokery is its inconsistency. Either it’s fine for actors to play people from different ethnic backgrounds or it isn’t. Either it’s fine to vote for candidates on racial grounds or it isn’t. Either it’s fine to declare a space offlimits to people who don’t share your ethnicity or it isn’t. It can’t be OK to do these things only if you are not white.
In his 2004 book, The Rise and Fall of Anglo-America, Eric Kaufmann called this tendency “asymmetric multiculturalism.” He traces it back to a 1916 essay by Randolph S. Bourne, who believed that every immigrant group should be encouraged to keep its separate identity except the square, old WASPs.
“Anglo-American conservatism has been our chief obstacle to social advance,” he wrote. “We have needed the new peoples — the order of the German and Scandinavian, the turbulence of the Slav and Hun — to save us from our own stagnation.”
It took a century for this bizarre notion to spill off campus into general society — and, now, into the world beyond America. Only in the past decade has asymmetric multiculturalism, the idea that people should be allowed to do and say different things depending on their ethnicity, come to displace free speech, free association, and equality before the law, the tenets upon which Western civilization previously rested. Even more recent is the idea that we should impose it on more conservative cultures.
Nevertheless, the asymmetry is there. Claiming that Cleopatra was black is no different, in principle, from claiming, as the Nazis did, that ancient Greeks were of a Germanic race that had originated in Atlantis. I don’t care what they taught you in school. ★
“The most absurd thing about modern wokery is its inconsistency.”