What? Sub-Saharan Africa is a specific area defined (by the UN) as every nation in Africa south of the Sahara, which is in North Africa. BTW if you google "Black Africa" it has the same definition as "Sub-Saharan Africa" does. In fact, it's clear that "Sub-Saharan Africa" was coined deliberately to be use as a socially acceptable replacement for the term "Black Africa".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-Saharan_AfricaThe point being, the
indigenous population of that region are what we call "African people".
The cognitive dissonance stems from trying to hold onto the idea that words always have a
single definition that is consistent across all possible contexts and in all possible scenarios. They don't. Demographers
mean black people when they say someone is of "African descent", and law enforcement
mean black people when they say someone is of "African Appearance". Pointing out e.g. that "African Appearance" could theoretically mean that someone looks like an Arab since Egypt is in Africa is entirely missing the point: the person
saying "African Appearance" clearly
means black, and pretending that we don't know that is just ... being a dickhead. It's just ignoring what people actually mean, which is
not ambiguous, and trying to make out that it's ambiguous by bringing in other - irrelevant - meanings of the same word.
e.g. when people talk about African
people they're talking about peoples of black African descent, but when Geographers talk about Africa the
continent they're referring to an abstract division of land. Sure, there's overlap between these ideas but they're not the
same idea. It's just a quirk of history that we use the term "African" to refer to both ideas. It's similar to how e.g. "Japanese" can refer to people of Japanese ethnicity, or anyone who is a citizen of Japan. But these are actually unrelated concepts: ethnically Japanese people aren't
required to live in Japan, and non-Japanese people don't magically become
ethnically Japanese merely by getting Japanese citizenship.