This paper will cross-analyze Na’um Bey Shuqair’s (1863-1922) Amthāl al-ʻawāmm fī miṣr wa-al-Sūdān wa-al-Shām (1894) [Common Proverbs in Egypt, Sudan, and the Levant] and Jughrāfīyat wa-tārīkh al-Sūdān (1903) [The Geography and History of Sudan], widely considered the first full history of Sudan, to demonstrate the formative role that both indigenous and foreign transnational notions of Arabness played in shaping racialist discourse in early twentieth-century Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Shuqair was an Ottoman subject born in Syria and an officer of the Egyptian Military. He became the head of the historical department of the military’s intelligence services upon the 1896 transfer of the department to the Sudan Government. In the preface to Amthāl, Shuqair states that in writing the book, he sought to gather an encyclopedic body of information on the shared histories, cultures, myths, and literary traditions of the three regions, stressing that they were bound by their common Arab heritage. Shuqair’s racialization of Sudanese Arab groups in the first part of Tārīkh al-Sūdān, “geography,” in which Shuqair conducts an ethnographic study of the five Sudanese races he names (“the Blacks, those who look like the Blacks, the Nubians/Berbers, the Beja, and the Sudanese Arabs”) echoes this sentiment. He posits Blackness in constant and contradictory opposition to Arabness. This offers an opportunity to complicate the “colonized colonizer” triptych that has come to define the triangulated relationship between Great Britain, Egypt, and Sudan through the foregrounding of nineteenth-century histories of enslaving in Ottoman-Egyptian Sudan (1821-1884). These works demonstrate how colonial mediators like Shuqair—whose disposition was informed by his experiences living under Ottoman rule and amongst burgeoning ideas of a politicized Arab identity—worked within local (yet hegemonic) understandings of race and Blackness to define and shape colonial understandings of the racial “essence” of Sudanese groups. This article will ask: what histories were erased by this prescription of Arabness onto Sudan? What were the parameters and metrics by which Blackness and Arabness were defined against one another? How did civilizational discourse inform the imagined distance between the two racial characters? In doing so, this analysis will center the decisive role that Arabness and anti-Blackness played in Anglo-Egyptian Sudanese racial formations to demonstrate how grammars of colonial racial hierarchies were informed by a multitude of discourses and epistemologies.