I once took an Africana Studies course at UMass Boston and the professor taught us that the noses were broken off the statues due to the hatred of black peoples by white explorers over millennia. She also taught us that the ancient Egyptians were black and that it was black people that built the pyramids. When I innocently asked her why the slides she showed us seemed to show Egyptians as having more middle eastern a…
Suffice it to say, the genetic evidence shows that Egyptians (and their southern neighbors) are an indigenous African population, with the current residents of the region generally descendents of the people who were there 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5 thousand years ago. The question of their blackness is a political one - as blackness itself is a social construct of the modern age, predicated on appearance and political necessity rather than strict ancestry, and generally inapplicable to ancient populations. In this case, the continuous and vehement insistence that Egyptians were not "black", over a century and a half of Western scholarship and backed by varying rationales as the years proceeded, is useful as a study in the politics of race and perceived technical and societal capability.
No one gets so up in arms about whether or not the Ancient Greeks were "white" (Super-Alpine white).
Edit: I suppose I asked for it, considering my audience. Thank you for living up to my worst expectations. (Seriously, delete the post.)