The diversity discourse appears to serve an insidious form of racism and Northern Euro supremacist agenda (with a redefinition of the Western world and a reframing of the classics). Please stop classifying people according to race, and stop creating racial stereotypes and divisions in the name of “diversity”, while doing some smug virtue signaling. Look up “framing” in a decision theory textbook and you can see what I mean. This is no different from funding Al Qaeda headcutters and women-enslavers in Syria in the name of “democracy”.

Romans were Meds, get over it. We know from Lazarides et al., Zalloua and others that ancient Greeks and Levantines looked similar to modern ones (and were close genetically to one another). You can’t pick and choose. (Note how the “diversity” police kills diversity by reducing something rich to a binary classification).

Background: The BBC cartoon showed a subsaharan African as part of a “typical” Roman Brit in the name of diversity. The UK “bien pensant” establishment now has a binary classification“white” and “other” that is, “nonwhite”, whatever that means, a classification that encompasses anything that is not Northern European and, if Mediterranean, comes from a “diversity country”, that is from a non EU-member. One nonwhite can substitute for another. If that’s not racial supremacism, what is?

Somehow this Northern-Eurocentrism and diversity virtue signaling flows backward, by reclassifying Romans and Greeks, as shown in the figure above. If you are going to call Mediterraneans nonwhite, you will be separated from Greek, Roman and Judeo-Christian traditions. For Ancient Greeks looked like modern Greeks, see, later. So there has to be a way to frame this point correctly, with Europe’s “borders”. The Northern Euros have always had problems with Meds; somehow they want some of the cultural prestige and ancestry, but never the skin hue.

Do not make Hannibal subsaharan. He looked like a Neapolitan. It is dismissive to consider all “other” as one group.

Myth Correction 1: The Term “White” is not indicative of race but indicative of purity.

If for a mixed parentate white + other= other, that is, anything mixed with white = something nonwhite, then necessarily white is not a race but something indicative of purity.

Stop using it.

Myth Correction 2: Romans were Meds, the distance between Romans and Brits was considerably larger than that between Romans and other Meds (includes Maghrebis).

The genetic map of current populations. You can see the inner cercle with “Meds”. Clearly Mary Beard and her “diversity” bullshitters are clueless about basic genetics and diversity.

In Petronius’ Satiricon, it is stated that Jews and Nabateans (from today’s Jordan) have the same skin color as Romans; to pass for one of them all one needs is circumcision and ears piercing. But for a Roman to pass for a Gaul or an Aethiopian, it would require a white or black mask, respectively. (Thanks, Tom Holland). This should put to rest that Jesus looked like a nonwhite theory. Or the very definiton of “white”.

That also should put to rest the separation between Roman and East Meds.

Note that Northern Europeans had initial difficulties accepting that Meds were “white” (Jews, Southern Italians, Lebanese and East Meds were slow in being accepted as “white” in the U.S. in the early 1900) but they ended up being accepted as such in order for the butter people to claim a classical pedigree.

Mary Beard assuming that if Septimus was non Subsaharan, he has to be Italian. But Septimus’ story with the Ethiopian should indicate that he was not black, since he got angry to see an Ethiopian.

Myth Correction 3: Ethnicities in Ancient World follow water, not land

Myth Correction 4: Race doesn’t go away when you talk about it