I agree fully with this. As a history graduate I can acknowledge it's a big problem in the field of study with garbage academia.
Certain groups have been trying to hijack race and colour to prove their narrative, as an example that ancient Egyptians were in fact sub Saharan African black, claiming that Western history has white washed them.
I don't really care what colour actor plays a historical role on TV (nobody has a right to that outrage since Laurence Olivier played Othello) but trying to propagandise actually historical events and research is not on.
The Egyptian = sub-Saharan "black" thing is a particularly extreme racist lie when it's applied to the Egyptians most commonly depicted on screen, the Ptolomeic Egyptians. Most famously, the last Cleopatra. I forget which number Cleopatra she was. The famous one, lover of Gaius Julius Caesar and Marcus Antonius. That whole Egyptian dynastry was entirely of Greek ancestry and would have looked Greek.
It's even reached the extent of these people complaining about
Egyptian actors playing the roles of Egyptians because they think Egyptians are too "white" to play the roles of Egyptians. The denial of reality has reached that degree of craziness.
Accurate. A picture of a roman legion with a few Black faces would not be implausible and might stir some interest in the subject. Depicting one or two legionaries and having them all or half of them be Black is a little... over-representative. It's not really a big deal to me, so long as they're not trying to push an inaccurate view of history. Likely they did it just to generate some discussion or as an interesting point. In amongst a slew of so much political agenda and historical revisionism though, it's a little "hmmm".
I think it's more than a little "hmmm". I think it's deliberate propaganda to promote racism. There would also be an opportunity to use an accurate portrayal of history to reduce racism rather than increase it because there genuinely wasn't racism in that context in reality. A Roman from Numidia, a Roman from Bithynia...they were Romans. Particularly so in a legion, where they would sleep in the same tent, fight and protect each other in the line, etc.
And I think they didn't care both because they weren't taught to see race and identity as the same thing and because racism tends to result from widescale migrations, not individuals. If there were mass migration maybe you'd have started to see more racism. But a couple of Black guys show up in your English village and people are more fascinated than hostile. (Naturally, so long as they're Christian!).
Which is exactly what happened. By the early renaissance period migration from Africa to England was on a much larger scale (not always voluntarily - some were slaves) and that's when the racism started in earnest. Most famously with Elizabeth I's public comment that "there are of late divers blackmoores brought into this realme, of which kinde of people there are allready here to manie, [..]”
As you also rightly point out, religion was another important factor. The medieval migrants were almost exclusively Christian. That was the reason they migrated to England - they wanted to get out of Islamic countries and into Christian ones and England was a common choice. My guess is that was at least largely because England had a lot of ships and thus more opportunities to get there from north Africa. But later on that wasn't the case and that was the second big factor in the change. Elizabeth I was clear and explicit about the big problem being that "most of them are infidels, having no understanding of Christ or his Gospel".
In a high or late medieval English port town or city, especially on the south coast, there probably wouldn't even have been the fascination you refer to because while the number of people with dark skin was small it probably wouldn't have been small enough to be enough for another person with dark skin to be a novelty. In a village, sure, but not a significant port.
Some while ago, I watched some documentaries about forensic anthropology. Best known in the novels by Kathy Reichs, but it's a real thing. There's a unit for it in the UK. Anyway, one of the human remains they examined was exhumed from a medieval friary in Ipswich that was discovered when some building work was being done. What attracted attention was that the remains were initially identified as a
sub-Saharan man by the archeologists who worked the site before the building work was allowed to be done. That would have been fascinating. Someone migrating from Africa north of the Sahara to Ipswich in the middle ages was nothing to write home about, but from south of the Sahara was a different thing entirely. That wasn't known to have happened. The amount of information the team was able to uncover was fascinating, but the person's birthplace wasn't. The initial identification was mistaken - they definitely came from north of the Sahara.
Oh, don't get me started on the Afrocentrists. I've had some EPIC arguments with them about Egypt. A while back a tomb of two half-brothers was found. One of which was half-Nubian the other not (different mothers rather than different fathers, I presume). That sole fact when it emerged was like dropping a pig in a piranha pool. Afro-centrists swarmed on it ignoring everything else. Hello - you had Nubia (a Black nation) immediately South of Egypt. And later invaded by Egypt. Of COURSE there were Black people in Egypt. It didn't make it a "Black Civilisation". The other one is one single line lifted without context from Herodotus where he describes Egyptians as being dark skinned. He meant darker than Greeks and goes on to explicitly say they were the same as (iirc) Colchans who we know were not Black and further go on to talk separately about people with actual Black skin "with hair like wool" as another group again. But no, whenever you talk with an Afrocentrist, they'll tell you that a Greek historian said Egyptians "had dark skin".
It's particularly dumb because if they want a historical Black kingdom to create some Golden Age racial narrative (like Zionists and Jerusalem or White Supremacists and Rome), Nubia and Ethiopia and right ******* next to Egypt and were Black kingdoms. Pretty successful ones, too. But I guess Egypt has the name recognition.
Laying claim to Egypt can be coupled with laying claim to Greek knowledge being copied from Egypt and then run on to claiming that pretty much everything was invented by "blacks" and stolen by those evil demons, the "whites". Perfect for "black" supremacists, but they have to nail down the claim to ancient Egypt first. No doubt at least some of them know it's a lie, but it's a politically useful lie.
