He was from Lybia, though. How dark is that? A funny anecdote from a book of my friend who backpacked Africa 15 years ago: A (dark skinned) Sudanese man was referring to some other Sudanese people from his village as "they are black". He himself also appeared black to my friend, but the man didn't consider himself black. It appears that (many?) people from North Africa are quite precise in differences of their spectrum of skin tone :)
Libya is still white then? It feels like you're just moving the goal posts to include all people under "white". If the Roman empire had covered all of sub-saharan Africa I wonder if you would be arguing that they're really white after all.
The whole point is that ancient peoples, and especially Romans, are not a homogeneous group of people. Whether they define themselves as white is not what you should be arguing about, because most definitions of "white people" includes a diverse set of ethnicities as well.
I don't know whether Lybians consider themselves white or not. The Lybians that I've seen in person (maybe a dozen) didn't appear much darker than my European compatriots. Yes, I can spot the difference, but it was more in facial features than in darkness of their skin color, which was fairly "whitish".
WRT the Lybian Roman emperor: no one claims that ALL Roman citizen were white, or Italic, or European. Any such large Empire was heterogenous. But it is safe to say that a typical Roman citizen, espicially a Senator, would have been white for any reasonable definition of "whiteness", especially in a TV series. There was one black US president (his mother was white and father black if I remember correctly), but a typical US president so far was white.
I don't have anything against hiring a bunch of Chinese or Zimbabwean actors to play Senators, but that would certainly look odd. In the same way as hiring a bunch of Ukrainians to play Zulu warriors would look odd.
What's your source for the claim that a typical Roman citizen is white? That's a pretty bold statement. Much bolder than the relatively non-controversial statement that Rome had a diverse population.
You also seem to be really caught up on senators. If you read the entire article, you'll note very little attention was given to senators.
Even so, that is not what the original argument was. The argument was that Rome was not homogeneous. Even in a heterogeneous society, there will be trends towards looking one way or another. The problem is simply with depicting all of Rome as (essentially) British.
Nobody has mentioned China or Zimbabwe, so this last argument is a lazy straw man.
"White" is a very confusing term which should just be avoided in these discussions. Even talking purely about ancestry of ancient peoples (including Romans), it conflates very diverse origins - Old European farmers (reflected today most clearly by Sardinians), Near Eastern/Levantine (found peculiarly in ancient Etruscans, which agrees with their mythology that tells of a descent from some ancient people of Lydia), Eurasian steppe peoples (this would be the PIE culture-related component that people tend to think about most readily, but there was a lot less of it in the urbanized Mediterranean area than farther north in continental Europe!) were quite distinguishable back then, even though all of them might be described very loosely as "white".
> What's your source for the claim that a typical Roman citizen is white? That's a pretty bold statement. Much bolder than the relatively non-controversial statement that Rome had a diverse population.
We're circling back to the definition of "white". How's that a bold statement? Today's Great Britain has very diverse population, too, including lots of people from Africa, and yet I wouldn't think that a statement that a typical Brit is white is controversial. Typical Brit is not black, although there are many black British people, of course. And even if we constrain discussion to the most narrow definition of "white" (say, 18th century Englishmen) let's not forget that English people are the result of centuries of mixing of Britons, Germans, Celts... So, white Britons are themselves of diverse ancestry, but all these diverse ancestral people are "white". Let me repeat that race is an artificial construct, but if I'm pressed to say if someone is "white" or "not quite white" I can only go by outside appearance. Someone in Europe can have some genes from one Zimbabwean ancestor, but if he "looks white" to me, I can only say he's "white".
> The problem is simply with depicting all of Rome as (essentially) British.
Yes. That is a TV series. The point of TV series (in my opinion) is not to be 100% accurate, it's to entertain and (somewhat) educate. And the people in TV series are not real ancient Romans, but current actors. The series is for British audience, so it's normal that it's filled with British actors. If the series was produced in Bulgaria, the senators would be played by Bulgarian actors. Both are not exactly of the same color spectrum as ancient Romans, but are close enough to pass as Romans to their viewers. If the series was produced in China, and Romans were played by Chinese actors, that would probably pass as normal to Chinese audience. Maybe Zimbabwean actors could pass as Romans, at least in sub-Saharan Africa; why not? I'm not sure why people insist so much that British actors are bad representation of Romans. They seem quite OK to me (I'm not British).
But now that you mention it, Septimius Severus was a dark-skinned Roman imperator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severan_Tondo