Trolled again! Mary Beard in online row over black Romans
POPULAR historian Mary Beard found herself the target of bitter social media abuse after defending the authenticity of a BBC animation featuring a black Roman soldier.
Critics branded the educational video ‘politically correct’ and claimed it was part of an agenda to ‘pretend Britain always had mass immigration’.
The leading Cambridge classicist and expert in Ancient Rome took to Twitter to defend the film, pointing out there was extensive evidence of Romans originating in Africa coming to Britain – unwittingly unleashing a torrent of attacks branding her ‘a batty old broad’ and ‘a pretentious know-nothing’.
It is far from the first time that the outspoken academic has been targeted by Twitter trolls. In 2013, she was attacked for her looks on TV and she retweeted a message from a former public schoolboy who called her ‘a slut’ to her 42,000 followers.
This time she was supported by others who have also been trolled, including the author JK Rowling who tweeted in her defence.
The video at the centre of the row has been on the BBC schools website for three years and focuses on the family of a fictitious highranking Roman soldier overseeing the construction of Hadrian’s Wall.
However, the fact that he and his ‘typical’ family are portrayed as black became a topic of debate after American ‘alt-Right’ blogger Paul Joseph Watson last month described it as an example of ‘the Left… literally trying to rewrite history’.
Professor Beard replied on Twitter that she believed the video was ‘pretty accurate’, pointing out that a Roman governor of Britain came from what is now Algeria.
But her intervention sparked a fierce backlash from detractors – some of whom openly admitted to never having read a book on ancient history. In a blog for the Times Literary Supplement, Professor Beard wrote how she was subjected to ‘a torrent of aggressive insults, on everything from my historical competence and elitist ivory tower viewpoint to my age, shape and gender’.
Among those who waded in to attack her as a ‘politically correct gestapo’ was US economics professor Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a former broker whose books have attracted a cult following among Wall Street financiers.
Professor Beard wrote that many of the attacks were misogynistic in tone, with posters referring to ‘Prof Taleb’ while pointedly calling her ‘Ms Beard’.