“Northern ‘white’ and Sub-Saharan ‘black’ Africa”,  this line got to me. Color was never how you tell who’s African and who’s not. I’m Egyptian, I’m white, and I’m African.

This whole north/south divide isn’t history; it’s not culture; it’s just an old racist idea wearing a geography costume. Africa was never one color or one people. From Egypt to Nigeria to South Africa, different languages, different religions, and different looks are still all African.

I get where the divide came from. Colonialism, religion, politics, all of it. But knowing where a lie comes from doesn’t make it true. Nobody gets to tell me Egypt isn’t “really” Africa or that being Arab and being African can’t be the same thing. That’s not a fact; that’s just a story people kept repeating until it stuck.

I don’t need to prove I’m African. I already am.

Header image sourced from Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/478577897914692122/ Portions of this reflection were proofread with AI assistance (Anthropic, 2026). Anthropic. (2026). Claude (Sonnet 5) [Large language model]. https://claude.ai