There is an article called “The Black Pharoahs” in the February 2008 issue of National Geographic. Egypt has a long history of being taken over and ruled by foreigners.
There was much racial mixture throughour Egypt’s history due to their proximity with Nubia and the region below that.
I think what confuses people when they hear the term,”Black Phaeroes”is they think of people who look like modern Nigerians.Yet because they didn’t look like say,Kunta Kinte,didn’t mean that they looked like Yul Brynner either.
A lot of Egyptians I know look rather similiar to Barak Obama or a light skinned version of Mike Tyson.
The best answer I've heard to question of "Were the Egyptian Pharaohs white or black?" was "Yes"
Egypt was multi-ethnic. Sometimes the pharaohs were white, sometimes black. A clear example is the twenty-fifth dynasty (780-685) when Egypt was under control of the Nubians.
Cleopatra, (there were many Cleos, THE Cleopatra commonly referred to was Cleo VII) Egypt's last Pharaoh, was certainly white. She was a Greek of the Ptolemy line. Of her ancestral line, only one remains unclear in ethnicity, her grandmother. And even that is mitigated by the perception of the Ptolemy's and the Greek in general as disdainful of the native Egyptian population.