There was no “racism” in ancient Rome, when “emperors were white, black, Arab, didn’t matter,” former presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy wrote on Sunday.
The entrepreneur posted photos on social media on Sunday of him and his family at the Colosseum in Rome.
“The color of your skin was like the color of your eyes. *Citizenship* is the distinction they drew,” he wrote. “It wasn’t just about what you got in return, it was about your duty to your nation.”
Ramaswamy added that Roman emperors were born in Libya and Arabia. “The fact that people think these things are so incredible as to be implausible reveals how our understanding of history has become unnecessarily racialized,” he wrote.
The Colosseum is said to have been built with the spoils of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and with Jewish slave labor.