While many Arab states, like Egypt, are indeed “pigmentocracies,” many of Egypt’s political elites are descendants of the Turkic Mamluk slave dynasty. Does their slave descent, which many black nationalists deem crucial to African identity, render them bonafide Africans, free of racial guilt? In addition, despite the North African regimes’ insistence on the primacy of Arab identity, the northern tier of the African continent is home to an extraordinary ethnic, linguistic and phenotypical diversity, and one cannot treat North Africa as geographically distinct and detached from a racially unified, indigenous “Black Africa.” The challenge in examining Sudan’s long-running civil war is to understand how, unlike other African civil wars, the conflict came to be “racialized” and not “ethnicized.”