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Netflix Turns Cleopatra Black — Like Euclid, Eratosthenes And "Other African Mathematicians"

By John Derbyshire

04/18/2023

Netflix has produced a docuseries about Cleopatra. The great queen of Egypt, who was of entirely Macedonian-Greek ancestry, is played by a black actress.

That brings to my mind the dumbest item in the commentary that followed my getting fired from National Review back in 2012.

This item was published in The Guardian, Britain’s leading crazy-left broadsheet newspaper. The author was a black American mathematician named Jonathan Farley.

Dr. Farley objected to the idea that black mathematicians of the first rank have been few and far between, since, actual quote from him:

Obviously Euclid, Eratosthenes and other African mathematicians outshone Europe’s brightest stars for millennia.

Euclid and Eratosthenes were Greeks of the third and fourth centuries B.C. who lived in Greek cities on the North African coast — Alexandria and Cyrene. There is no evidence they were black. From what we know of them and their societies it’s extremely improbable.

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