so we're doing "You can't draw Ancient Greek Mythological figures as Black, that's inauthentic and disrespectful of real Greeks" arguments again.
First, that's patently racist (see the long history of European powers interpreting and re-interpreting Greek mythology to support the idea of a White Western Civilization where they trace their own spiritual/philosophical lineage back to the Greeks - why is that given a pass but tumblr artists drawing Patroclus as Black in their ship art is not?) and second, deeply weird to assume that Bronze Age and Classical Greeks had never interacted with an African before (the Ancient Greeks.... knew about Africa. It's right there. Egypt was the HEIGHT of awesome civilized coolness in the Bronze Age, Bronze Age Mycenaeans thought Egyptians were the coolest)
There are also points to be made that Greek mythology so often gets divorced from Greek culture and its own history in service of claiming it for a genericized western European/American culture. And that's worth considering too.
But it's wrong to act like those are somehow opposed concepts. Drawing Greek mythic characters as Black is not inherently disrespectful or inaccurate or un-Greek. Especially because the Ancient Greeks themselves saw no contradiction between "being African" and "being Greek," at least in their mythic imaginations.
Some of the most important Greek Mythic Genealogy goes thus:
Poseidon had a son with Libya, the personification figure of… well… Libya. To the ancient Greeks, Libya was basically all of Africa west of Egypt, and Aethiopia was the part of Africa south of Egypt. Poseidon and Libya's son was Belus, ruler of Egypt. Belus married Achiroë, daughter of Nilus, the god-personification of the Nile River.
Belus and Achiroë had (at least) two sons, Aegyptos who ruled Egypt and Arabia, and Danaus, who ruled Libya.
Danaus had fifty daughters with several different women: Polyxo, a Nile River Naiad; Memphis, the personification-goddess of the Egyptian city Memphis; Europa, also said to be a daughter of Nilus; one or two dryad nymphs; and various other women, one of whom was specifically named as Aethiopian.
Aegyptos meanwhile had fifty sons, and wanted his sons to marry Danaus's fifty daughters. Danaus, fearing a prophecy that his son-in-law would kill him, decided to flee with all of his daughters to Argos, where they made him king (because he was descended from Io and Zeus four generations back).
Anyway then the plot of The Suppliants happens, all the daughters of Danaus kill their husbands except Hypermnestra, and Danaus's daughter Hypermnestra and her husband Aegyptos's son Lynceus founded the Argive royal dynasty. (Lynceus's mother is either another daughter of Nilus, Aegyptos's Phoenecian cousin, or a princess of unknown ancestry.)
They were the great-grandparents of Perseus, who married the Aethiopian princess Andromeda, who were then the great-grandparents of Heracles.
This is why in the Iliad, the Greeks are called Danaans: descendants of Danaus. That's right, all the Greek mythic heroes in the Iliad traced their spiritual and cultural descent from an African! (Two Africans: Hypermnestra and Lynceus, even.)
I'm not a scholar of Classical Greece. But I've done some study of the Bronze Age Aegean, when these mythic stories of the Trojan War and such were set, and it was an extremely interconnected place. Egypt was trading with and/or conquering Kush (in Southern Egypt and Sudan); Crete and Greece and Turkiye and Syria and Egypt (or rather, the Minoans and the Mycenaeans and the Hittites and the Canaanites/Lebanese/Syrians and the Egyptians. also the Assyrians and Babylonians) were trading, communicating, and possibly intermarrying with each other. These were not ethnically separated nation-states, they were all part of the Mediterranean World later mythologized in Classical Greek views of the ancient age of heroes. This mythological lineage reflects that understanding.
You can draw the Greek mythic figures as Black and African and still also Greek. There's no inherent contradiction. Point to their Danaan Argive history of Danaus and Aegyptus. They wouldn't mind.
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