It looks like you added this bit after I replied to the comment, another instance in which you’ve gone back to a comment that I’ve replied to.
As for the fact that there’s a history of using and favoring white statuary in support of white supremacist claims and beliefs: pointing that out and saying we should keep it in mind as various professions and practices go forward is not a “leftist” thing. It’s just the promotion of significant facts, and truths – of the very things that academics get paid to pursue.
What is “political,” though, is right-wing complaints about the promulgation of facts and truths that the right would like us all to ignore, as well as the labeling as “leftist” the mere promulgation of certain facts and truths.
Denise McCoskey, a professor of classics and black world studies at Miami University who has been cited by Bond for her work on race in the ancient Western world, said she thought Bond’s essay essentially asks why, “when we know better, do we want to continue diminishing our understanding of the ancient world by covering over all its differences? Why do we want the ancient world to reflect ‘us’ – a particular group of ‘us’ for sure – back so perfectly rather than use it to interrogate more fundamentally who we are, what we think and why?”
McCoskey said she’s never been targeted for her own work touching on similar issues, but said her students do react “quite dramatically” to the notion that the ancient Greeks and Romans didn’t see the race in black and white. That reaction is one of “excitement,” she said, and an opportunity to see something perceived as fundamental in a new way, but “that very proposition is much more threatening and distressing to other audiences in today’s climate.”
Perhaps most distressing about Bond’s case, she said, is that “it seems quite clear that the people who have had the most violent reaction to her essay are the ones who have not actually read it,” relying instead on “distorted and misleading summaries.”
I really wish they hadn’t added that example in, given that modern-day Spaniards were happy to cast Danish-American (but Spanish-speaking) Viggo Mortensen in one of their own historical films, Alatriste:
I can’t find the reference, but apparently Crowe had the idea that he would speak Spanish during the film.
The biography supplied by the films writer claim
"Was born in the province of Baetica in Hispania in AD 152. He was the son of Meridius, the governor of the province, and of Lucretia, the daughter of the Roman Senator Bodaus."
Baetica’s governors were, at a various times, Romano-British, Romano-Iberian, Romano-Greek, and especially Italian, among others. I believe that the term of office was as short as two years.
