"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.
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.