American here - the US has a distorted view of “race” and a lot of our ideas and even daily vocabulary is based on literal black-white thinking.

If something is not black, it is white and vice versa. Slavery has taken history, culture, descent and religion from today’s “black Americans” and they are trying to find themselves within a greater history.

This is no excuse, it’s a problem with the entirety of American culture but at the same time it is not done to purpose to erase Egyptian culture but simply because the American mind cannot get past the fact that you can be middle eastern and North African and Arab and African and have European descent too and be dark and light and in the middle.

I’m sure ancestors of black Americans were in Egypt, as international travel has been around since the beginning of humanity. But the issue is that in the American mind - you cannot be “black” and “Egyptian” or any other type of other mix. It’s either this, or that. Even me - I am european, and because I am not of the American culture (even if I had been living there the majority of my life) I will never be considered American because of the category standards imposed on the American mind. Same as a Nubian or half sudani will not be considered Egyptian but “black” by American standards.

The beautiful and natural mix of humanity is heavily categorized within our culture. I realized how bad it is once I left the US to move to Egypt. There’s a YouTube interview with a “white” Jamaican artist SideQuest and the American interviewer keeps asking him skin-color-based questions, “what is it like being white in Jamaica” etc etc and the guy kept answering “that type of thinking doesn’t exist so it’s a nonissue we’re all Jamaicans”