Try searching online for a Louis Theroux programme in which he visits some Black Hebrew Israelites. Louis Theroux seeks out weird subjects and these people are definitely among the weirdest he’s ever done. It’s been years since I watched it, but I seem to remember they had a painting of John Paul II being trampled under a horse. They also tried to convince him that Beethoven was black. Actually they claim that quite a lot of people were actually black, including English monarchs and Welsh crooner Sir Tom Jones.
We have some of these people here in London too. They sometimes gather outside Oxford Circus or Elephant and Castle tube stations to spread the word about the Twelve Tribes of Israel and how most of them are black. Some of them claim also that the Irish are descendants of the biblical Israelites. I know that a not insignificant minority of black people claim that almost everybody of note in ancient history was black. It’s actually not so weird when you consider that in the 19th century there was a widespread view that the British were descended from the Israelites. This is apparently why male royals were circumcised from the time of Queen Victoria until the late 20th century when the Princess of Wales is said to have put an end to the practice.
Are they racist? Probably, albeit in an almost touchingly bizarre way. How can we refute them? Honestly, I don’t know whether it’s worth the effort! If you do want to refute them you need to educate yourself pretty thoroughly about ancient Near Eastern/Mediterranean history so you can explain why it’s unlikely that black people are descended from Jews, Egyptians, and so on, as well as why it’s unlikely that Celts, Anglo-Saxons, and Germans are actually black, despite clearly not being black.
