Yes and no, Joel. You are an educated American Black man- and what challenges the African mindset is that you are, at your heart, American. The way that people are judged in Africa is NOT by skin color, as it is in Western nations. You and I would likely agree on a great deal of this, but I can't argue with fifty years of anthropological research. I think what's so difficult for us as Americans (which I am assuming and may not be correct, Joel) is that skin color and facial characteristics, for example, are the determinant. That's not shared over here. There are fundamental, deep and at least for now, intractable differences because belonging is measured differently. As a White person, I expected to be judged this way. I was also surprised, but then, as this is one of many, many trips to this continent, this made sense. Perhaps after much much much education and exposure a Tanzanian Maasai MIGHT consider the potential of a connection. However, fundamental value sets don't change. From the native African standpoint the American Black is first last and foremost American, with American values. I don't argue that the potential exists, but it's distant. Humans don't change their perspective about such things easily: witness intractable racism in the USA. I would add that African nations have also been subjected to many years of brutal behavior by the sons of wealthy Africans who were eduated in the West and promptly came back and emptied the coffers of their countries and escaped to Switzerland and the like. There is a lot of history around the West, here, Joel, and while I am no African, nor am I an anthropologist, I would argue that we simply do not understand. We can't. And I would also suggest that we may never- no matter how much a Black person born outside the African landscape will ever be truly connected to that distant homeland. Cultural differences here are very stark, and again, the African Black doesn't look at skin color. That alone makes for a very, very different kind of conversation and understanding with someone whose entire reference point, imposed upon them by a racist country, is about that tiny later of epidermis. This doesn't make me right. I am just suggesting different ways to understand.