The argument in the 19th century (and in the 20th century) over who was "really" Black or whether "African" meant "Black" is significant not because there is or is not some "real" Blackness that can be determined, but because it shows how important the semiotics of race were.

There's no such thing as race; the history I'm trying to get at here is how THE IDEA of race became central to arguments about the classical world well before Black Athena. And the focus on 19th century classical scholarship suggests that the theses that the Egyptians were "Negro/Black" AND that they had a profound influence on Greek civilization were both widely accepted in the 19th century. This understanding fit in perfectly well with the enlightenment assumptions of the oneness and equality of humankind and the interest in "civilization" as a universal stage in human development, not as the province of any particular ethnicity. (See Caroline Winterer on the American enlightenment.)

The ethnologists, who took it upon themselves to prove the essentialism of "race" as a physiological and heritable ontological category, had some preconceived notions they wanted to "prove" by biologizing race, including the idea that Black people were less capable that white people. The greatness of the Egyptian civilization and its widely accepted influence on the Greeks were stumbling blocks to their agenda. Their answer was to appeal to polygenetic theory. It is only after polygenetic theory is widely discredited that we begin to see scholarship in the classics more polemically engaged in claiming "complete originality" for Greek culture. The timing of these shifts is not coincidental.

The interesting fact here is not that someone in the 1980s published a book claiming profound Egyptian/Phoenician influences on Greek culture; the interesting fact here is that the broad claims of Black Athena were widely accepted by 19th century classicists. By 20th century classicists, not so much. Frederick Douglass would surely have seen this as an example of moving the goalposts.

But how do we explain how the notion of Egyptian / African influence on Greece fell out of view of the averge educated person (and lots of classics scholars) to the point where Bernal's very claims (never mind his wobbly argumentation) seemed like an innovation. His claims were not new; they were just new to a late 20th century audience.

Why?