I don’t think our modern concept of ‘whiteness’ really applies to ancient Rome. Most Romans (or at least the literary elite) would probably not have distinguished a North African from, say, a Greek or Italian in those terms. One bizarre seeming strand of classical geography, inherited from Greece, theorised a kind of…

Oi, as someone who grew up in a part of England once considered to be ‘Jutish’ I find your erasure of my people’s history offensive.

Classical concepts of ‘race’ were just a little bit different to our own. The only Roman author I’ve studied in any depth was from southern Gaul, so presumably solidly white to modern eyes, but he saved his crudest and most polemical ethnic stereotyping exclusively for the whitest-of-white people: northern Europeans.

“Nobody whom I feel is less fat than I am gets a free pass to talk about feeling fat, because I feel the fattest and I hold all of the passes and my precious labels won’t stretch to include your skinny ass!”