Tatem Blog Post

(6.) “Yeah, I just found out that Cleopatra was a Black woman.”

“What?”

The first student went on to explain her newly learned information. The second student exclaimed in disbelief, “That can’t be true. Cleopatra was beautiful!”


(7.) What had this young woman learned about who in our society is considered beautiful and who is not? Had she imagined Elizabeth Taylor[5] when she thought of Cleopatra? The new information her classmate had shared and her own deeply ingrained assumptions about who is beautiful and who is not were too incongruous[6] to allow her to take in this new information at that moment.



I annotated this text by underlining key phrases like, " That can't be true. Cleopatra was beautiful!" I also underlined other sentences such as, "Had she imagined Elizabeth Taylor[5] when she thought of Cleopatra? The new information... and her own deeply ingrained assumptions... were too incongruous[6] to allow her to take in this new information..." I drew an arrow pointing back to the phrase about Cleopatra being beautiful and said in my own words that this was a racist comment. The actress/portrayal of Cleopatra was beautiful. There is no possible way that this student would have known what Cleopatra really looked like because she died a long time ago. I believe that this paragraph is important because it showed an example of prejudice with wrong information (which I wrote right next to the paragraphs).