Lupita Nyong'o is playing Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.
And somehow, the internet is on fire.
People are calling it "blackwashing." Elon Musk called Nolan "an anti-white racist." Matt Walsh said that nobody on the planet would consider Lupita the most beautiful woman in the world. Greece is divided. Think pieces are flying from every direction.
All because a Black woman was cast as a mythological character who, and I cannot stress this enough, was literally born from an egg after Zeus disguised himself as a swan.
We're debating the skin color of a woman who hatched from an egg.
Let that sink in.
The double standard nobody wants to talk about.
Here's what frustrates me the most.
Elizabeth Taylor played Cleopatra in 1963. A white American woman playing an Egyptian queen and nobody batted an eye. Not then, not for decades afterward.
Jake Gyllenhaal played the Prince of Persia. A Swedish-American man playing a Persian warrior. Gerard Butler played an Egyptian god in Gods of Egypt. The entire cast of Exodus: Gods and Kings was white playing Egyptians, Hebrews, and North Africans.
Nobody called any of that "whitewashing" at the time. Nobody accused those directors of being "anti-Black racists." Nobody questioned whether those actors were "beautiful enough" to play those roles.
But a Black Oscar-winning actress plays a fictional character from Greek mythology, a character who was never real, never documented, never photographed and suddenly everyone becomes a historian.
Halle Bailey and The Little Mermaid. The exact same story.
Remember 2023? Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in Disney's The Little Mermaid. The outrage was immediate.
"Ariel was white." "This doesn't make sense." "This is woke culture gone too far."
And yet Ariel is a mermaid. A fictional half-fish, half-human creature living under the sea. She doesn't have a race. She doesn't have a passport. She was drawn by animators who chose to make her white because that was the default.
But when a Black girl plays her? That's the problem.
