"Iremember my grandmother saying to me: I don’t care what they tell you in school, Cleopatra was black." So asserts a trailer for a new Netflix "docuseries" looking at the lives of powerful women in history. Alas for the speaker, an American of African descent, her grandmother’s idea of historical truth was highly subjective. It was built on an absurd generalization about all Africans being black, and the regrettable assumption that skin color is an important criterion for judging people’s merits.
