There is a lot here about other works that I don't think really relevant to Jada Smith's thing, so for simplicity's sake, let's say I agree with you on all of that. No argument.
What's your source on this part about darker skin, tho? I found this pretty quick:
Video: Anxieties about Race in Egyptology and Egyptomania, 1890–1960
In 1948, he wrote, quote "One must remember that Egyptology starting in 1821 grew up during the African slave trade, the sugar empire, and the cotton kingdom. Few scholars during the period dared to associate the Negro race with humanity much less with civilization" end quote.
In 1915, in The Negro, he wrote, "Of what race, then, were the Egyptians? They were certainly not white in any modern sense of that word, neither in color nor in physical measurement, in hair nor countenance, in language nor social customs. They stood in relationship nearest the Negro in earliest times. And then gradually, through the infiltration of Mediterranean and Semitic elements became what would be described in America as a light mulatto stock of octoroons and quadroons" end quote.
Du Bois also struck out at the school who asserted that all advanced civilization in premodern Africa was due to white Hamites rather than to Negroes from further south. Quote "Ancient and modern mingling of Semite and Negro has given rise to the term Hamite under the cover of which millions of Negroids have been characteristically transferred to the white race by some eager scientists" end quote.In 1930, the US census succumbed to the one drop rule dropping the category of mulatto and classifying those with any fraction of Negro ancestry as Negroes. When Breasted's 1935 textbook edition discarded the brown option, however, he annexed ancient Egyptians to his quote "Great White Race." Ignore the white patch here which represents the ice sheet in the last Ice Age, maybe since this is a geology hall here, I shouldn't say to ignore that. But concentrate instead on the sweep of his great white race from the Arctic through the Sahara and the Atlantic to the Urals and the Caspian. The black race and the Mongoloid or yellow race are reduced to small letters on the margin and, of course, not labeled great.
Breasted insisted, quote "The peoples of the great Northwest quadrant as far back as we know anything about prehistoric man have all been members of a race of white men who have well been called the Great White Race. The men of this race created the civilization we have inherited. The Mongoloids on the east and the Negroes on the south occupy an important place in the modern world, but they played no part in the rise of civilization.In conclusion, race was rarely far beneath the surface of 19th and 20th century America and Europe. And the legacy of ancient Egypt became a high stakes racial prize. The Egyptomania revealed in Blashfield's mural affirming Egypt as the founder of civilization underpinned Breasted's and Reisner's pioneering of professional Egyptology in America. The textbook Ancient Times helped shape standard college courses of Western Civ. The 1935 edition's insistence that early civilizations sprang from a Great White Race, embracing both ancient Egyptians and quote "our Indo-European ancestors" end quote was in tune with much scholarly and popular opinion of the day.
Du Bois lacked the specialist authority on Egypt of his Ivy League and Berlin contemporary, Breasted, but he understood far better the socially constructed nature of race. His challenge to exclusivist white claims on the heritage of ancient Egypt still echoes today well beyond the ranks of Afrocentrists.
I don't think that our modern (and recent centuries') culture's biases about light and dark skin can be accurately projected into the past.
Recognizing that your own biases are not shared universally can be helpful, I think.