Cleopatra was not black

Cleopatra VII Thea Philopater of Egypt was not black.  Contemporary frescoes depict her with pale skin and auburn hair.  

Aside from Ptolemy the Great, the scions of the dynasty named for him descended from one ancestor from the Macedonian Seleucid dynasty in Syria, one from the Macedonian royal family, and one Macedonian nobleman who served as one of Alexander the Great’s general. 

In all subsequent generations, the Ptolemies adopted the native Pharoahs’ habit of intrafamilial matrimony; she herself was the daughter of a father whose parents were siblings who was uncle to her mother and her mother’s uncle.  She, like all members of the dynasty, was fully Macedonian and nearly all Ptolemy.  Wikipedia has a detailed family tree in the article for “Ptolemaic dynasty”.

So, while having a dyed-in-the-wool proud Zionist play Cleopatra in a movie is in bad taste because of her questionable politics and its attendant racism against Arabs and other members of non-European cultural groups, but it is not “white-washing”.  It can’t be because Cleopatra herself was “white”.

The photo below (borrowed from Wikipedia) is a contemporary post-mortem fresco of her in Italy.