British racial stigmas in semi-colonial Egypt effectively blackened and deracinated Egyptians

Evidence

As the contemporary observer and historian Muhammad Sabry puts it, “Egypt suffered at seeing herself treated with disdain and cruelty, like ‘damn niggers’ and gypsies (bohemians) by the innumerable and ignorant functionaries, filled with arrogance, that England had been sending to Egypt since the declaration of the protectorate, and by the Tommies who believed that ‘Egypt was English and that the natives were people of colour imported to the country.‘“19 Sabry’s choice of words reveals how powerful the stigma of race had become under these semicolonial circumstances: not only did the British treat Egyptians like blacks and possess all the expectations of subservience inherent in that concept, they denied them the right of being native in their own land. In imposing a color stigma on Egyptians and making them black, Sabry believed that the British had deracinated them in their own homeland, as if they were servants imported from Africa for the pleasure of the British occupiers, or, to put it more ironically, as if the Egyptians were like the Sudanese. — Eve M. Troutt Powell, A Different Shade of Colonialism_…, 821

Categorization

• XREF: Directly feeds the reader’s Egypt-vs-Sudan colonial comparison: the irony that British race logic treated Egyptians as if they were Sudanese itself links the two colonial projects.
• QUESTION: How did the British race hierarchy actually sort Egyptians vs Sudanese administratively — did Egypt’s lighter-status semicolonialism ever confer privileges Sudanese lacked?
• DEEPTHINKING: The passage shows racial stigma operating as deracination — the colonizer’s racial category not merely demeaned Egyptians but negated their nativeness in their own land, a subtle mechanism worth sitting with.