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Red_Tarsius

It's not an isolated incident. The same show depicted ethnic people in questionable situations.

– Sub-Saharan Celts http://i.imgur.com/WSHbj36.png

– A Sub-Saharan English Nobleman, 1215AD http://i.imgur.com/Y5WFtXO.png

– A Sub-Saharan blacksmith, Iron Age Britain http://i.imgur.com/XptrQDP.png

– A North-African Norman priest http://i.imgur.com/5JHBzMN.png

The criticized video was supposed to be "An exploration of life in Roman Britain shown through the eyes of a typical family." http://i.imgur.com/tg25juJ.jpg

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Christ, this needs to be further up. All this discussion of whether or not the cartoon was politicized becomes moot when they have dark-skinned Celts.

How do you know that there weren't dark-skinned Celts? But maybe you're saying that there are?

Consider that priests of the Lemba tribe carry the Y-chromosome Cohen gene.

http://www.worldjewishcongress.org/en/news/lemba-tribe-in-so...

The fact that we don't know means that we must depict Celts as black, just in case. After all, it's a possibility.

There could have been one black Celt, no? People did get around.

Why not red? I mean, how do you know there wasn't one?

I'm not sure what you mean by "red". But as I've said, people did move around. And really, "all Celts were white" is arguably far less likely than "some Celts were not white".

Except no one is saying that. They are questioning the portrayal of a "typical" celt family.

OK, so the cartoon features two people. One light, and one dark. But are the authors claiming 50% dark? And how would they represent 1% dark?

The point of depicting a "typical" scenario is that you don't represent the 1% dark. In the same way that a representation of a "typical" household doesn't include a homeless man, a billionaire, and someone in between. The billionaire and the homeless man are not included because they are not representative of what is typical.

Sure, I get that. But it's been the rule to never show blacks in contexts where we know they existed, and were even common. So a little balance doesn't seem unreasonable.

Lying is still lying, even if you feel that the lie accomplishes some political agenda that you happen to believe in. In this case, if you say that this is a typical family when it is not, then the fact that you lied for what you think is a nobler purpose doesn't make this OK.

History doesn't really operate on "well you don't know for sure". The Romans describe the celts as light-skinned and blonde. Modern people with Celtic ancestry are also light-skinned. There's absolutely no evidence to suggest they were anything but.

OK, fair enough. But maybe that was just Celts that those Romans ran into. I certainly don't know. But damn, before I read about the Cohen gene in the Lemba, I had assumed that black Jews were converts.

Celts are a fabricated identity. The modern representation arose out of trying to have a pan European ancestry and identity in the 19th century.

What about the Celtic languages?

Do you have a source for this? Who exactly were the Romans conquering if not Celtic Britons?

"Some Roman soldiers had dark skin" and "the show is going too far in their attempts to make it easier for dark-skinned children to identify with the history of the place where they were born" can both be true at the same time. You don't have to be Mary Beard to understand that the former is true, just read the two Cesar books, hardly something only experts in the field do. They are full of examples of foreign units operating on continents far away from home. Centuries later, foreign mercenaries only got more integrated.

This whole story is just right wingers picking the wrong example out of ignorance and then stubbornly using mob tactics to compensate. They can't have a meaningful discussion about the show because they are too narrowminded to understand why the example they picked was the wrong example for the point they were originally trying to make.

What are you even talking about. I can not figure out what you are saying, could you clarify? What is the wrong example? The multiple examples in the comment you replied to?

The comment was citing multiple examples, the whole original article and the discussion that lead to it was about exactly one of them, isolated from the others. Even the title (both of the original article and of this hn page) is about Roman Britain, not about Celts, 1215AD noblemen or Norman priests. Really not that difficult.

Had the arguments about skin colour in that BBC show not been based on the roman soldier example (which happens to be a very weak example, due to the roman empire being so famous for putting soldiers into places so very far from their origin), Mary Beard, being an expert in roman history, would not even have weighed in.

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