Lotta 'but the Moors!' types too. When the Moors weren't black, they were a mix of Arabs and Berbers (indigenous northwest Africans) who moved to Spain - ie. they may have been deeply tanned, but not black, and would resemble Middle Easterners more than any sub-Saharan black people. Those peoples still have a very low opinion of actual black Africans today, just ask the ones they're selling as slaves in Libya.
And even at their darkest Berbers (specifically Tuaregs, the Berber sub-ethnicity that lives furthest to the south in the Sahara) still look likethis IRL. The ones who lived closer to the Mediterranean coast and thus would have been the most likely to migrate to Spain with the Muslim conquerors look more like this. (She can probably thank the Vandals, a tribe of Germanic barbarians who moved to North Africa & built a kingdom there during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, for her fair hair)
And they were regularly mistaken for gorillas by North Africans. I’m not joking, the first North African explorers that saw gorilla just assumed they were hairy black people. Then they killed and skinned them to show of how weird they looked back home.
Lotta 'but the Moors!' types too. When the Moors weren't black, they were a mix of Arabs and Berbers (indigenous northwest Africans) who moved to Spain - ie. they may have been deeply tanned, but not black, and would resemble Middle Easterners more than any sub-Saharan black people. Those peoples still have a very low opinion of actual black Africans today, just ask the ones they're selling as slaves in Libya.
And even at their darkest Berbers (specifically Tuaregs, the Berber sub-ethnicity that lives furthest to the south in the Sahara) still look like this IRL. The ones who lived closer to the Mediterranean coast and thus would have been the most likely to migrate to Spain with the Muslim conquerors look more like this. (She can probably thank the Vandals, a tribe of Germanic barbarians who moved to North Africa & built a kingdom there during the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, for her fair hair)
There are some black tribals in Libya, at least today.
They got indigenous blacks in southern Egypt too.
And they were regularly mistaken for gorillas by North Africans. I’m not joking, the first North African explorers that saw gorilla just assumed they were hairy black people. Then they killed and skinned them to show of how weird they looked back home.
Neither Libya nor Egypt are parts of Europe, so they can hardly count for these Redditors' arguments.
Incidentally, during the Middle Ages the blacks in what's now southern Egypt & Sudan were Christian opponents of the Muslim Arabs, and eventually destroyed by them (and the Muslim Ottoman Turks). They certainly wouldn't have helped the latter invade other Christian kingdoms, such as Visigothic Spain or the (much closer) Byzantine Empire.
Even in the times of the Roman Empire, lighter-skinned North Africans considered themselves distinct from and looked down upon darker-skinned sub-Saharan Africans, of whom a few (so few that even many Romans-from-Africa were surprised by their existence) served in the legions. Like the Emperor Septimius Severus, an African Roman (of mixed Punic, ie. Phoenician/Lebanese + Berber, and Italic heritage hailing from modern western Libya) who saw an 'Ethiopian' (actually black) legionary and was shocked & appalled by the sight, thinking his presence to be a bad omen.