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For many scholars, the concept of race to discuss the ancient Egyptians is a modern ideological and social construct that fails to have agency in antiquity. Therefore, scholars have attempted to negate the ancient Egyptians' African identity by stating either that race does not exist or that the Egyptians were a race of their own. This article seeks to discuss Cheikh Anta Diop's two cradle theory by using historical and linguistic evidence to place ancient Egyptian culture in its proper cultural context. This study examines the "proto-cultures" of the three "cradles" posited by Diop: northern, southern, and the zone of confluence.

Departing from accounts of minority group politics that focus on the role of group identity in advancing group members' common interests, we investigate political decisions involving tradeoffs between group interests and simple self-interest. Using the case of black Americans, we investigate crystallized group norms about politics, internalized beliefs about group solidarity, and mechanisms for enforcing both through social pressure. Through a series of novel behavioral experiments that offer black subjects individual incentives to defect from the position most favored by black Americans as a group, we test the effects of social pressure to conform. We find that racialized social pressure and internalized beliefs in group solidarity are constraining and depress self-interested behavior. Our results speak to a common conflict—choosing between maximizing group interests and self-interest—and yet also offer specific insight into how blacks remain so homogeneous in partisan politics despite their growing ideological and economic variation.