Located between European colonial racial constructs of a “civilized” whiteness and an “inferior” blackness, Egyptian identity has long occupied a liminal status. The internalization of these constructs led to the alienation of Egypt from its African neighbors, and to a perpetual cultural and political detachment from Africa and Africans, both on the continent and in the diaspora. In this essay I will use the anthropological concept of liminality to investigate what may have caused a lack of translatability of the African American struggle to Egyptians, and the failure of the pan-African movement to take hold in Egypt. I will analyze how the race and ethnicity of both modern and ancient Egyptians were described and mobilized by rival colonial powers: France, England and the waning Ottoman Empire. I will highlight certain strands of counter-colonial nationalism of Egyptian intellectuals of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including ‘Abbas Mustafa ‘Ammar’s Arabism/Egyptianism, Salama Musa’s Pharoanicism, and Sayyid Qutb’s pan-Islamism, to demonstrate an internalization of European colonialist attitudes towards race. Applying this approach might help us understand what may have caused Brent Edwards’ décalage—or the “resistance to crossing over”—of African American struggle into the Egyptian consciousness.