Colonial scholars systematically reclassified Egypt as non-African to sever black achievement

Evidence

It would be really outrageous,” writes the Rev. Ternpels, “if the white educator were to insist on destroying the black man’s own, particular human spirit, which is the only reality that prevents us from considering him as an inferior being. It would be a crime it was of the greatest importance to mount a counterattack. That being granted, and almost all the Western scholars having deliberately set out to tear Egypt away from Africa, even at the risk of no longer being able to explain it, there were several ways of accomplishing the task. Gustave Le Bon’s method, blunt brazen assertion: “The Egyptians are Hamites, that is to say, whites like the Lydians, the Getulians, the Moors, the Numidians, the Berbers”; Maspero’s method, which consists of making a connection, contrary to all probability, between the Egyptian language and the Semitic languages, more especially the Hebrew-Aramaic type, from which follows the conclusion that originally the Egyptians must have been Semites; Weigall’s method, geographical this time, according to which Egyptian civilization could only have been born in Lower Egypt, and that from there it passed into Upper Egypt, traveling up the river… seeing that it could not travel down ( sic). The reader will have understood that the secret reason why this was impossible is that Lower Egypt is near the Mediterranean, hence near the white populations, while Upper Egypt is near the country of the Negroes. — Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, 140

Categorization

• XREF: Connects directly to Said’s Orientalism toolkit this reader is assembling: the same representational violence that severs Egypt from Africa will reappear in Islamophobia scholarship as claims that Muslim science/culture was derivative. — connects to: Medieval racial classification from Noah’s sons seeded later European denials of African achievement; French colonial scholarship displaced Egyptians’ own self-understanding — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 114; The ‘Negro’ category erased Africa’s contributions to Western civilization
• SEED: Potential essay: ‘The Racial Geography of Knowledge’ — tracing how ‘civilization’ is systematically relocated away from non-white populations through linguistics, geography, and racial taxonomies.
• DEFINE: Exemplifies the mechanism by which colonized peoples’ achievements are symbolically expropriated and reattributed to whiteness — a concrete instance of the ‘Other’ being denied coevalness.
• CANDY: The Weigall thesis — that Egyptian civilization could only have traveled down-river, never up — is a delightfully absurd illustration of racial reasoning bending geography.

Related

• Egyptian racial thought blended medieval stereotypes with European civilizational concepts (similarity 0.83)
• Egyptians realized Europe ranked them closer to Africa than to Europe in civilizational terms (similarity 0.83)
• French colonial scholarship displaced Egyptians’ own self-understanding (similarity 0.82)
• Medieval racial classification from Noah’s sons seeded later European denials of African achievement (similarity 0.81)
• Egyptian racial constructions of blackness hardened mid-century. (similarity 0.81)
• Colonial scholarship displaced natives’ own self-understanding with the colonizer’s vision (similarity 0.80)
• The ‘Negro’ category erased Africa’s contributions to Western civilization (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian writers blended medieval Black stereotypes with imported European power terminology (similarity 0.80)
• British semicolonial rule racialized Egyptians and denied them native status in their own land (similarity 0.80)
• British racial stigmas in semi-colonial Egypt effectively blackened and deracinated Egyptians (similarity 0.80)
• Egyptian intellectuals increasingly racialized identity against African societies (similarity 0.79)
• Medieval racial theology forced later Europeans to deny Egyptian achievements (similarity 0.79)
• Egyptian elites deliberately treated the French as colonial guides (similarity 0.79)
• Western Egyptologists distorted ancient history to fit racial cosmology (similarity 0.79)
• Egyptians blamed the Sudanese ‘African world’ for slavery’s existence. (similarity 0.79)

Broader Connections

• The ‘Negro’ category erased Africa’s contributions to Western civilization #corroborates (0.85)
• Medieval racial classification from Noah’s sons seeded later European denials of African achievement #corroborates (0.82)
• French colonial scholarship displaced Egyptians’ own self-understanding #corroborates (0.78) — Deepa Kumar, Islamophobia and the Politics of Empire, 114