Many white people disagree that any white washing has been done to Kemet. When they see the brown skinned paintings, braids, afros on statues, etc, they either cannot see or will not admit a very obvious difference from the white skinned, straight haired artistic re-makes they create to represent Kemet in their own images. These same people claim that Blacks (as well as many whites) who are calling them out on this, are just "making things up", "over reacting", and so on.
In actuality far too many white people have a subconscious aversion to blacks to the extent that if they admire the culture of anything created by African peoples, they cannot credit the creators or admire them in their natural image. Instead they must convert their form into something that is more acceptable or beautiful in their opinions, which is typically a lighter, whiter version of the original. And or terms that historically were use to refer to a prestigious group or individual African/Black person, are then used to refer to much lighter, or white people. This is the phenomenon that many people call 'white-washing' and it can be seen from art, to movies, to music, etc in every aspect of culture. Using the Nubian inspired, white washed art is just one clear cut example of how this works, though, I cannot insure that all the artist were white. It is possible that some of them are black and other ethnicities, but even that would show that there is some subconscious "racial" dissonance between reality and personal mental concept. Luckily most of the images I found in the data collection were fairly accurate in one way or another, no matter who the artists were, but of course this doesn't say much for what has already been done to Kemet, and is being done to Nubia in small doses.
Nubia seems to be the key to unambigiously unlocking and demonstrating most of the untruths that have been taking place with out a doubt. We don't question whether the Nubians were and still are black as apposed to Kemet, so I will use them as an example to show that modern white artists still will 'white-wash' or arabize them from the way they depicted themselves.
Now answer me this, if people can see the darkest of dark Nubians as being fair skinned white people in their minds, why would you assume that its impossible that the same thing happened to Kemet? The hypocritical arguments and double standards used to distort the perception of Kemetian physical appearance is nothing different than the ideas these images suggest about popular ideology; "The Ancient Egyptians certainly were not, a black African people, trust us, we are honest, credible and accurate about history. But its perfectly fine too if we want to portray black African cultures as white, if we feel like it".
In recent times the term Nubian has changed some what to encompass all black Africans, but in cases where we see clear Kemet and Ancient Nubia inspired features we can be sure that the artist or photographer was trying to depict Ancient Nubians, not blacks in a general sense, in their own eyes. In most cases where the subject is a modern person with out any Ancient Nubian/Kemet elements, costumes, jewelry, etc (i.e. a photograph) we can be almost sure that the title of Nubian is classifying the subject as such. Since Nubia is modern day Sudan, people might refer to modern Sudanese as Nubians, even if they belong to the recent Arab population that had nothing to do with Nubia. This is not too different from modern Arab-Egyptians being confused with Ancient Egyptians, this is only a greater time difference between the decline of Kemet & Nubia and the appearance of Arabs in the modern day countries. In either instances the modern Arabs are hardly an accurate representation of the Ancient people of both Kemet and Nubia as they were not there during the development and most of the reign of the Empires, but showed up when they were in decline and/or contributed to it. This is the same way that modern Americans (white and black) are not an accurate representation of the Native Americans that inhabited most of the American land masses, even though some mixing took place. Modern Americans, originally European of course showed up and caused/contributed to the decline of Native America. Obviously they do not share historical cultural characteristics and should and are thought of as two different groups of people. This is how people should actually view the Nubia-Kemet relationship with Arabized regions of modern Africa today.
Note: The rights to these works belong to their respective owners not The Anthroblogogist, I am simply providing snapshots of them and a link to the originals for reference. All artists are understandably entitled to create visions of art as the see fit; The visions have simply become apart of my social observation.
Behold:
If you need to compare to actual Ancient Nubian art & photos of real Nubian Sudanese click here and browse this site.
