How can one begin a comment by saying, "I know little of this topic" and then find fault with how I have addressed the topic of my essay?

It seems you are mistaken on the topic of my essay.

The question I'm asking here is why was the idea behind "Black Athena"—that Egypt influenced Archaic Greece (700-450 BC or so)—widely accepted in the 19th century and mostly discounted by the early 20th century. You may notice that's the temporal focus of the piece. Bernal's thesis appeared to be an "innovation," but it was standard for 19th century classicisits. The "cancellation" happened between the late 19th century and the early 20th century, decades before Bernal's book came out, as the piece explains. I'm not talking about Bernal's thesis getting canceled in the 1980s; I'm talking about how the field of classics arrived at its supposed consensus before the 1980s. Bernal was reintroducing a once widely-held idea. Why did it ever cease to become widely held? That's what this piece addresses.

I have read Black Athena, and I have read Mary Lefkowitz et al.'s response to it, and several other essays surrounding the controversy. I have read VDH's The Death of Homer (and Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind, and Roger Kimball's Tenured Radicals, and Dinesh D'Souza's Illiberal Education, and on and on). I have some expertise in the canon wars / culture wars in higher education in the 1980s-1990s. This piece is about the culture wars / civilizational debates of the 1850s - 1890s.