People of colour in Roman Britain, Mary Beard, and Twitter feuds Ah, Twitter, where we all go when in need of racism-fueled drama and BBC Bitesize, the one-stop shop for all things revision and learning. But what does one get when the two are combined? In the case of a particular 2017 set of Twitter feuding, it’s Mary Beard - world-renowned Classicist and Cambridge Professor - and some guy who thinks he knows more about Roman History than she does, fighting over a character in a BBC Bitesize video.
In December 2016, BBC Bitesize posted a video about life in Roman Britain on the BBC Teach YouTube channel, and it featured a Roman family with a dark skinned father who is a soldier. And this angered Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the standard heavily opinionated, but lacking in the brains department troll that Twitter is unfortunately home to, who works at an American far-right radio show called the Infowars. His illthought out tweet was as follows: ‘Thank God the BBC is portraying Roman Britain as ethnically diverse. I mean, who cares about historical accuracy, right?’.
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By: Imogen Day
Mary Beard certainly does. And with years of experience teaching Classics, she’s certainly knowledgeable, replying with a stylish ‘that is indeed pretty accurate, there’s plenty of firm evidence for ethnic diversity in Britain’.
You’d think it would stop there; someone who’s actually knowledgeable about the subject has stepped in. But no! Racist and historically inaccurate Twitter doesn’t work like that. Taleb kept going, and before too long, he had presented a series of evidence about how ‘Sub-Saharan genes have evaporated’ in native Britons, while Beard maintained that there were indeed dark skinned people in Britain at the time.
