Correcting grammar is racist.

[Regina]

I think Mediterranean and Middle Eastern people throw racial categorizations askew tbh. You can't cleanly categorize them because they're brown enough that they're distinct from Northern Europeans, but then not quite black either. And fucking diverse, to boot. I don't think there's another race where you can find such variation in skintones and features. It ends up with Middle Easterners and North Africans being tacked onto either "white race" or "black race" when theoretically they don't fit into either.

With that said, general preference for lighter skin has been observed in many different cultures and it always long predates colonialism. All Asian cultures were worshipping the (relatively) lighter skinned in their societies long before they had seen what Europeans looked like. I think it's bullshit historical revisionism when people claim that notions of "light skin superiority" are purely a European construct, and that non-Europeans are incapable of being racist as fuck on their own.

I can't with salty debates about what race the ancient Egyptians were though, when it's so fucking obvious. They went to great lengths to depict Europeans as very fair-skinned and Nubians as very dark-skinned, with themselves in the middle in various shades of brown and "olive" skintones. In other words, exactly the same as modern Egyptians, Europeans and black Africans. Shit's changed.