That might be neglecting the Middle Ages, when Moorish Muslims dominated the Mediterranean for a couple of centuries. The genetics of Italy (and Greece, Spain, Southern France, and N. Africa changed dramatically.
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Oh, it’s an area that has been mixing forever!
If you look at the face mask paintings on sarcophagi that are for ‘Romans’, they’re often clearly mestizo: African, Mediterranean, and even further east.
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Good point. Carthage and Rome was like a middle school romance: loved each other, hated each other, loved each other, hated each other…
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Romans are “White” because they had a big, impressive imperium, and because the European civilization (and thus USA by extension) is more or less descended from Rome, especially in terms of cultural self-image.
As usual, actual skin color or genetics are secondary or entirely irrelevant.
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Also, since the paint had long worn off of the big, impressive statuary the impression that noble Romans were white, ie. the color of the marble, was no stretch. The whole idea of the smooth, calm, graceful past was based on a misunderstanding of what the art actually looked like.
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For most people, the opposite of “Christian nationalism” is “tolerant pluralistic democratic republic” - you know, like the government clearly espoused in the Constitution and we’ve been (slowly but surely) trying to live up to for the past 250 years.
The problem is that MTG and her ilk think the opposite of Christian cough white cough nationalism is just some other nationalism that’s not theirs - Black nationalism, Muslim nationalism, “globalist Zionist nationalism” … whatever. So it’s all kill or be killed tribal politics, which is (duh) about as un-American as it gets.
Also that Betty Bowers video above needs more love, scary AF.
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While true that the genetics of Italy today may (or may not) differ from the Roman period, I can say with 100% certainty that Pontius Pilate wasn’t white. Because whiteness is a social construct that simply didn’t exist in the Roman empire. They structured their society along other lines, such as citizenship and social class.
Pontius Pilate (Wikipedia tells me) was probably from around Naples. As @RickMycroft points out above, whether that would make him white or not wasn’t even a settled debate in the 19th century. But that’s a question based on contemporary standards. Pontius himself wouldn’t even have understood the question.
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They are PERCEIVED as white, even though Rome was a Mediterranean empire, that was highly diverse. It’s considered “white” because Europeans in the modern era saw it as the “precursor” to their own empires. It was not, however, except for what influence they took from Rome or whatever meaning they imposed on Roman history to justify their own conquest of people they considered less civilized (which they defined, in part by race, which they saw as a scientific fact, not a social construct).
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