The casting Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy in Nolan's Odyssey is a good choice. As someone who cannot stand the way white supremacy and white nationalist movements repeatedly appropriate Greek history to legitimize their own ideology, I find this casting decision especially significant. One effect of this choice—among several—is worth focusing on here: beauty.

Helen is not just any beautiful woman. She is THE most beautiful woman in the world. It is her beauty that motivates Paris’s choice in the Judgement, when Aphrodite promises him Helen if he picks her as the most beautiful of the Goddesses.

White supremacy has long worked to enforce whiteness as the default and highest standard of beauty, especially when antiquity is involved. Ancient Greece, in particular, has been conscripted into this project, made to stand as an aesthetic and moral ancestor of modern white identity. Within that framework, supreme beauty—especially Greek beauty—is assumed to be white by default.

A Black Helen is threatening because she challenges an ingrained visual hierarchy, where whiteness quietly holds the top spot. A Black Helen asserts, plainly and unapologetically, that the world's most beautiful woman does not—and should not—belong to any single modern racial fantasy. A fantasy that Hellenism should not and must not entertain.