He was half Roman half Phoenician which was a Semitic people, so problems swarthy and tanned. There was one called Philip the Arab, who was born in an Arab province, but I don’t think his ethnicity is known. Trajan was an earlier Emperor so the fact that he was a Spaniard provincial and not Italian was a bit of a scandal at the time.

Ex slaves, sons of slaves and other ethnic peoples could climb the ranks of Roman society and get pretty rich and respected in their own right. But there was always a ceiling for those seen as outsiders, Even in the military.