>>49028544I'm not an expert on Japan but I'm fairly certain there is a story of a black samurai. But that's *not* the point. Pokemon is fiction, it's fantasy. Having black people is not out of the question in a fantasy setting especially since it's not in anyway a historical setting. Even in supposed "historical" settings many times people working on these things get many elements of dress, the way people lived and other things wrong yet if they add a person of color alt-right types go berserk. They fixate upon skin color rather than actual history accuracy, hiding their racism under the thin veneer of "historical accuracy".
My example was to highlight that in an area that I study it shouldn't be surprising to see black people at all. The incident with Mary Beard highlights how racists types hide their prejudice under historical accuracy even if they're the ones in the wrong. When it comes to the ancient world many alt-right types, and even modern people in general, appropriate the past to shape it to suit their needs. We tend to think of the Hellenes and Romans as *part* of our historical past, or as part of an unbroken chain of Western civilization stretching back to them which is never the case.
>>49028770It's not revisionist history but stripping away the prejudice that we hold and looking at the past in an objective view. As for my example the Ancient world was very interconnected. Many of the things we consider "Greek" like the "phalanx", citizenship, astronomy, etc are also attested in the Near East where the Greeks had a lot of contact. The world doesn't exist in isolation as I stated. The Greeks were part of an overarching world that included Persians, Thracians, the people of the near east, etc. they did not live in a vacuum.
