Danielle Belton's The Black Snob - The Snob Blog - Casting Cleopatra: Angelina Jolie Is The New Go-To "Person of Color"

Danielle Belton has done a very interesting article about how Angelina Jolie has been tapped to play Cleopatra in the upcoming movie based on her life. Belton explains the fact that people disagree on how Cleopatra looked and her skin color. I with Belton that Cleopatra was not Caucasian. She had Egyptian and Greek blood in her. No way she had blond hair and blue eyes. I think it is sad that Hollywood studios don't believe an actress of  African descent can be enough of a box office draw to play Cleopatra. I predict that in 30 years they will have actors not of African descent play Martin Luther King Jr and Malcolm X. I don't think that is a good idea. It's almost like people think the best way to solve racism is to ignore race. I think that is why we have talk of Spider-man being played by a black man or Wonder Woman being played by Beyonce'.  I think we can respect each other's racial differences without ignoring them.

Danielle Belton's The Black Snob - The Snob Blog - Casting Cleopatra: Angelina Jolie Is The New Go-To "Person of Color"

World Breast-Feeding Week

It is World Breast-Feeding Week! Wooohoo! It's important to bring awareness of the need of mothers to nurse their babies for as long as they can. In my own children, I can see how much better for them it is, although it's not easy for the moms at all!

So how does the artist that brought you art centered around Suri Cruise's poop and Britney Spears giving birth, naked, on a bearskin rouge celebrate World Breast Feeding week? Well, Daniel Edwards makes a sculpture of Angelina Jole, naked, sitting on a bench, nursing two babies one in each hand. Okay.

Edwards is quoted as saying:

“Hopefully, my sculpture inspires an increase of wet nurses to assist women who have concerns about mastitis, or passing HIV to their infant,” said artist Daniel Edwards in his Connecticut studio where the Jolie statue currently resides.

Okay, so this this is supposed to inspire women everywhere of different races and cultures. They are planning to have variations of the statue with babies of different races. What does it saying to basically cast a white woman as the representative of all women feeding different races of children? It could be my liberal education, but I have problems with the racial overtones of such an image. We can't forget the historicity of such symbols

Here is a video on the making of the statue.


Edwards says that the sculpture is base on the following magazine cover.


Here is some more examples of Edward's art

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