Was Cleopatra black?

Cleopatra VII Philopator (69-30 BC) is better known as 'simply' Cleopatra. She was the last active ruler of the Ptolemaic Kingdom of Egypt. The Romans portrayed her as stunningly beautiful and she was able to seduce two Roman emperors: Julius Caesar (100-44) and then – after he was assassinated – his successor Marcus Anthonius (83-30).

[Cleopatra]

Nobody ever really thought about the colour of her skin, until black American university students began to argue in the 1980s that Cleopatra might be black. I can understand the reason behind that flawed thinking: America has no collective history and blacks had their history ripped from them when they were kidnapped by their own kinsmen, taken to slave ships and sold in the Americas. These students subconsciously needed a role model, a power woman from Africa.

The point is that by choosing Cleopatra they showed a deeply disturbing level of wishful thinking. Cleopatra came from a family from Macedonia, Greece's most northern province. The people living there were (and still are) white skinned. Those black students then pointed to Cleopatra's grandmother, who was probably a concubine and whose name remains unknown. She might have been black, they argue. If that is the level of reasoning in American universities, I'm deeply worried, because the right argumentation is: if all other family members are white, then the most probable answer is that a concubine was also white skinned.

But if their level of their teachers was somewhat higher they would have understood that there were other female candidates that had a better chance of being black.

Ancient Egypt consisted of two kingdoms, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Upper Egypt or Nubia consisted of what is now Sudan and Ethiopia. The people living there were black. Once called the Kingdom of Kush, it was first conquered by Lower Egypt, but later the events were reversed and Egypt was ruled by black pharaohs.

[Hatshepsut]

The Bible mentions a visit from the queen of Sheba to King Salomon. While a number of theories about the location of Sheba are circulating, there are several clues that are worth mentioning. She came to Jerusalem "with a very great retinue, with camels bearing spices, and very much gold, and precious stones" (I Kings 10:2) . This wasn't a queen of some obscure little kingdom, this was a queen that equaled Salomon. Egypt was the only kingdom in the vicinity of Israel that could produce such priceless gifts, as Roman historian Josephus attests.

The Queen of Sheba was possibly Hatshepsut (1507–1458 BC), the fifth pharaoh of the Eighteenth Dynasty of Egypt. She is generally regarded as one of the most successful pharaohs, reigning longer than any other woman of an indigenous Egyptian dynasty. She was probably black.

[Update] What happens if you make a docudrama, which should be a 'dramatized re-enactment of actual events' (but isn't), about Cleopatra and depict her as black? The ratings of 'Queen Cleopatra' (2023) simply reveal the galactic stupidiy and ignorance of the makers. A critical review can be found here.

[I hope nobody is offended by my use of the words 'black' and 'white']