As a Greek I have absolutely no problem with the cast, beauty is subjective and Homer does leave the exact looks of Helen to the imagination of the audience. But that said he multiple times refers to her shining beautiful hair and her overly white arms.
As in many other cultures back then this signifies a sheltered, aristocratic life, untouched by the harsh sun of manual labor that the average Greek woman was exposed to.
As a greek I have a problem with it. The average person out there doesn't care to research things, they stay at first impressions. These agendas give way to idiotic and preposterous works like "Black Athena" which many people think it's actually true and that shapes realities which in turn can prove dangerous to one's cultural and historic legacy. The bbc also had a so called documentary series a few years back and portrayed Achilles as a black man. Since then I have seen countless, and I mean countless claims and comments of how Greece is actually a fictional country or that Greece's history and culture is actually stolen and that it has African and subsaharan roots. Recently also a woman made such claims in a TV talk show. She even claimed she was teaching that stuff to elementary school and that everyone who disagrees "simply doesn't know history".
I am more surprised that people find this okay but will lose their minds if a white person or an Asian has dreads on their hair and will call it cultural appropriation and cause a mess. In Greece many people thought it was unimportant to speak up when Skopians kept talking about their so called Macedonian origin and everyone laughed. A few decades later the northern neighbors managed to steal the name and make an identity for themselves, claiming not only the name but the history that comes with it. If that was troubling a small indigenous race in any other part of the world anyone would be furious but since Greeks are whites, it's just another day in clownworld.
I agree with you. But I do have to say that Greek culture became everyone´s culture. First from Alexander´s empire followed by Rome, the Arab Caliphate and finally from Europe´s Renaissance (basically, the barbarians who invaded Rome recovering ancient Greek knowledge) who spread it to the rest of the world. The amount of words that are used in every language that come from Ancient Greek is insane, specially for scientific, philosophical and theological terms. I guess we don´t call it cultural appropriation when it takes 3000 years.
I see your point. I will close by saying this. I am calling cultural appropriation the effort of some pseudo-intellectuals who try to make a name for themselves by distorting cultural and historical norms, making unsupported claims and adding their own personal ideology on texts that are thousands of years old and completely irrelevant to their suggestions. Claiming that Black Athena for example is factually true and historically based, on American TV no less is something big. It's not a yt channel with 5 subscribers. Then you get a movie with black Helen, a documentary with black Achilles and suddenly you have people from Africa actually thinking that the greeks stole from them. This is not only a monstrous level of irresponsibility but it is dangerous as well. Some people prefer to call this racism . I call them entitled and ignorant hypocrites. Race has nothing to with it and it gets thrown out there way too often. These changes and these depiction choices didn't happen overnight. It took time. And by spreading a false perspective people start to accept something as reality. And it's not.
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u/Character-Pirate1297 13d ago
I think most of it is a chain reaction to Afrocentrism, which is a reaction to white supremacy by itself.
Typical influence of the USA’s polarised culture to the rest of the world. It always has to be either that, or the other.