We Don't Need a Black Helen of Troy. We need more Black Mythology.

We wouldn't be aspiring for Black inclusion in the White imagination if we had more Black heroes and heroines.

Actress Lupita Nyong’o

I’ve been thinking about nostalgia, childhood, and being a Black girl who read a lot about myths and fantasized about playing roles that weren’t meant for her.

One of the earliest books I remember from my childhood is Amazing Grace, by Mary Hoffman—about a Black girl who loves acting and dreams of playing all sorts of characters. Her school puts on a play about Peter Pan, and she wants to play Peter. But she's told she can’t play Peter because she is Black and a girl. The book ends with her being triumphant and landing the role as Peter. I used to take that story as inspirational.

Thirty or so years later, I wonder if the message to Black girls, to fight to play white / European characters, to fight to expand the white imagination to include us— is ultimately a trap.

The recent racial furor over Lupita Nyong’o’s casting as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s remake of the Odyssey is yet another data point in the perils of remake/reboot culture and what seems like our culture’s inability — or refusal — to imagine and fund new stories about Black heroines, goddesses, princesses and other archetypes, or older civilizational stories rooted in Black and African cosmologies.

Now, I love Greek and Roman mythology. So much so that I used to carry around D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths around the house. I took Latin in high school, and briefly flirted with the idea of becoming a classics major in college. I think the Odyssey is a very important carrier of truth, specifically the way Odysseus represents the perils of nostalgia, the archetype of male strength through strategy and intelligence, and personal resilience through challenge. But I never thought that I needed to see a Black person in those myths.

As I have gotten older, I have studied more African and diasporic myths, cosmologies, and archetypes of Black feminine power. Many of them mirror or even are more interesting than the Greek and Roman myths.

This (and my old age, probably) is why I have less time and energy for making inclusion in the white imagination the horizon of Black liberation and progress — when Black and diasporic universes are at our disposal.

Three years ago, after Black actress Halle Bailey was cast as Ariel in Disney’s remake of “The Little Mermaid”, all racial hell broke loose.

Halle Bailey as Ariel in The Little Mermaid

White people, especially on the right, lost their damn minds, saying that there were no such things as Black mermaids. Black people, for their part, spent a good amount of time and ink arguing for why Black people and Black women in particular have long been associated with water, and have existed as water deities (Mami Wata spirits, Oshun, Yemaja, just to name a few from West Africa).

And like the story of fictional little Grace winning the ability to play Peter Pan, plenty of Black people celebrated Bailey’s casting of Ariel as progress.

At the time, I did a little Twitter experiment and asked white people on my feed to name a Black fictional superheroine or princess that they looked up to that was originally rendered as Black, and not a Black version of a white or European character. I also said that X-Men’s Storm and Eartha Kitt’s Catwoman did not count as answers. Suffice to say— the crowd struggled— pretty mightily.

I wrote about this experiment for the Washington Post— and I said “superheroines and princesses represent the possibilities of female empowerment, of “specialness.” Whether it is a woman who possesses superhuman abilities to fight for the good of humanity, or a princess who wields social power, privilege and desirability, these are the cultural archetypes of feminine power.

I also wrote that “the lazy entertainment corporations need to create and support original Black female characters, not reheat old White characters with Black faces.”

And of course, Hollywood is gonna Hollywood, and repeat whatever formulas produce predictable cash returns. The latest furor over the casting of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey feels like no exception. Billionaire and perpetual crybaby Elon Musk went so far as to say he would create his own version of the Homerian epic, claiming that Christopher Nolan “desecrated” the Odyssey. Once again, we have the same meltdowns over a Black actress playing a fictional, archetypal character from the Western canon. But perhaps there’s an added sexualized element—- that a white male director has “descecrated” the Odyssey by casting a Black woman is reminiscent of the hate white people get when they are accused of being “N—r lovers” and race traitors.

Many Black writers and creators I admire and respect have gone to great lengths to explain that dark-skinned people existed in Ancient Greece, that Lupita is stunningly beautiful and is indeed worthy of being seen as a symbol of power. I’ve seen takes litigating whiteness and race in Greece and the Mediterranean. We spend hours on social media creating outrage content— whether it is Black response to white outrage, or Black outrage at being told we don’t belong— all while white Hollywood studios and social media platforms rake in the money and the press.

All of this, for what?

Personally and intellectually, I am over it. How many times are we going to fall for fighting for the scraps— to be “the first Black to do X”, or the “only Black to do Y”? When are we going to realize that corporations’ intentional stoking of white and Black anxiety over Black inclusion— and specifically, inclusion of Black women is nothing more than a marketing strategy, a form of racial capitalism, that still ends up lining the pockets of rich white men and the Hollywood machine they control? When will we realize the power imbalances remain the same?

As I wrote three years ago, “Every American generation so far has grown up in a cultural environment that disallows Black girls and women as possessing some form of power over others, whether through super abilities or social power inherited through birth or marriage.”

As for Helen of Troy, I get why this role is so appealing. She occupies a unique position in the list of white feminine power—the ability to move men to launch ships, go to war, and destroy one another, a goddess-like level of power.

We have been conditioned to desire and envy this myth that white women’s beauty and femininity can compel men to go to war for them, when all too often in real life, Black women are the ones who are the most at risk and unprotected. And even this is unstable power, because it is dependent on how men see and respond to the women.

I am not trying to critique Black actresses who pursue and secure these types of roles.

And I am also aware of the difficulties for Black actresses in Hollywood, especially dark-skinned ones, fighting an industry that has long underpaid them and undervalued and promoted Black stories, especially stories that place Black women as holding a position of power over others (Ahem, why haven’t we gotten an X-Men Storm standalone movie yet??) Which is why when we hear of a Black Ariel, or a Black Helen of Troy, we are told to get excited, because of the scarcity of Black women being allowed to be seen in positions of power, particularly over men. And this scarcity is man-made, literally— we know how often women’s contributions to movements have been erased.

And very specifically with N’yongo, I commend her for her work on Queen of Katwe, a Disney film set in East Africa that tells the story of a young girl named Phiona Mutesi, who grew up in a Ugandan slum and managed to make a name and a better life for herself through chess. She wasn’t inspirational because of being desired by men, but because of determination, community, and the power of her own mind.

And perhaps this is why Nyong’o’s career is an interesting vehicle for the tension between Black women as iconic characters in the Western canon versus the relative lack of support for new stories featuring Black/African powerful female lead characters. Nyong’o has played a slave, a central powerful figure in Disney’s Black Panther in the Marvel universe, the protective mother of a Ugandan chess phenom, and now Helen of Troy.

What interests me most is that roles represent a world where a Black Helen of Troy creates buzzy racial controversy. Nyong’o was a central and key figure in Black Panther, a fictional African kingdom — in which I argued that Wakanda’s women were the true revolutionaries- that shattered records across the globe. But the brilliant film and novel story about Phiona, the chess Queen of Katwe, did not receive anywhere near the marketing push from Disney that it deserved.

We don’t need Black Helens of Troy. We need more Wakanda women. We need more Women Kings. We need more Queens of Katwe.

It is precisely in this moment of historical erasure and rejection of even the most nominal forms of Black inclusion that Black writers and thinkers, and especially Black women, should be focusing on building out the civilizational myths, histories, and heroines we already have. It is precisely the moment to create new mythical universes and characters for ourselves. We have to reclaim sovereignty over our own imaginative power to cultivate, interpret, and expand our own myths, symbologies, philosophies, and values.

Now, such creativity is happening, and many of these stories exist. Nollywood has never asked permission from Hollywood to create films. There are indie comic book creators like David Crownson of Kingwood Comics, who has created “Harriet Tubman, Demon Slayer.” I grew up hearing stories about Anansi the Spider, and learning about Yaa Asantewaa, the Ashanti queen who held off the British. We had the film “The Woman King” based on the real-life Dahomey female warriors, the Agojie. We have the history of Ethiopian Empress Taytu Betul, who played a major role in the historic Battle of Adwa in which Ethiopia defeated Italy. I’ve already mentioned the various Yoruba mythologies of the Orisha, which is the cosmological ground for the upcoming film “Children of Blood and Bone”, based on the book by Tomi Adeyemi (although the rollout has not been without controversies).

After years of writing about inclusion and its importance, I am arguing—maybe even with myself —that the task at hand is to re-allocate our limited time and attention towards these stories, and create anew from such rich, fertile history.

Otherwise, we will be trapped in the thinking that permission from the white power structure is progress. That waiting on corporations to include us is empowerment. That retelling the same stories 1000 times over is innovation. That being cast as the Western imagination's supreme archetype of beauty is how we can be reassured that we are beautiful.

The little girl in me was once inspired by the idea of fighting to play in roles imagined for white people.

But the woman I am now knows this: When you are sovereign, you aren’t begging to be let into other people’s imaginative kingdoms.