Racial Stereotyping in "Anthony and Term Paper

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Although Cleopatra is described as once being beautiful, her racial identity as an Egyptian and her representation of darkness and a darker form of sensuality is unmistakable. The queen admits this herself, even validating the blackness as ugliness stereotyping -- "Think on me,/That am with Phoebus' amorous pinches black,/and wrinkled deep in time?" (I.5)

But although the North African woman may be more desirable than Octavia in her form and in her height and in the shape of her forehead, any beauty she has is drugging and sedating like the drug she asks for from her castrated eunuch, rather than sustaining to Anthony. Her use of eunuchs, of course, underlines what she makes of the once-great leader Anthony -- a mere plaything of a strong woman. However, this characterization of black women in leadership positions and sexual positions in relation to white is hardly particular to Shakespeare.

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In fact, this perception of the black woman as both more powerful than the white woman sexually, and more desirous of sexuality is still evident in American stereotypes today, in everything from the depiction of Black women in rap videos to the 'jungle fever' rhetoric that plagues both black and white media, to the rhetoric surrounding the tennis prowess of Venus and Serena Williams, often referred to, in their height and beauty as Amazons. The assumption of the insatiable desire and curiosity between the races is an old one, and the idea that one pollutes the other is also a pernicious stereotype that even had recent airing over the controversy over an advertisement that depicted a white actress luring a black athlete from a prospective game, in a kind of negative black and white reversal of Shakespearean themes.

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