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Over the past three days I have been deluged with hateful messages from white nationalists for a post about osteoarchaeological research that confirms Roman Britain included people of black African and Middle Eastern descent. This is welcome news. motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/…
One common refrain was that in presenting scientifically verifiable evidence of the diverse past of Roman Britain, I was being "political", and that my status as an unbiased researcher was questionable.
But the ability to encounter, engage with, and assess a wide range of evidence is the essence of freedom of thought. The ability to encounter views and opinions that may differ from your own is the definition of what it means to live in an open society.
The question that is before us now, one raised by Popper and other thinkers decades ago in the aftermath of WWII, is whether we are willing to draw a limit on that freedom of expression when it comes to hate speech. 
Today, white nationalists and white supremacists operate using a wide range of rapidly-shifting coded speech and symbols. In the past few days, I've regrettably had to get an education in some of these. Here's one charming example.
Should academics, some of us paid by tax dollars, participate in these urgent contemporary conversations? As long as our methods and sources are transparent and our claims are backed up by verifiable evidence, I believe we should, and we must.
And perhaps most importantly, we need to redouble our efforts to be transparent about our methods. How do archaeologists, historians, and other scholars deepen our knowledge? What methods and sources do we use? What kind of analysis is needed to accurately understand the past?
If our aim is to be public-facing scholars, we must constantly make transparent *how* we gain knowledge about the past and why it takes many years of training in languages, literature, history, and various disciplinary methodologies to be able to effectively understand the past.
This is not disciplinary gatekeeping. It's not elitist. It's simply affirming that interpreting the past requires specialized knowledge and expertise. We'd never say it's elitist for a brain surgeon to claim he's better able to operate than a person who hasn't gone to med school.
In fact, claiming and standing firm in our expertise while being transparent about our methods and sources is the opposite of elitist. It enables others to see that it's possible that they, too, can become experts.
And when white nationalists like the one that attacked #Christchurch weaponize the past & use it to justify mass violence, it’s clear that our work matters. We have the knowledge and expertise to push back against false appropriations of the past. Historians, our work is urgent.
