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That’s exactly where I draw the parallel.

There was a great book about the Rwanda Genocide called “Out of America: A Black Man Confronts Africa” written by Keith Richburg, a liberal black American reporter writing for the Washington Post who spent three years in Somalia, Rwanda, and South Africa covering events there.

He was in Rwanda during the genocide.

As a black American, he had preconceptions about Africa that were completely wrong, and it was very disillusioning to him. He thought, as a black man, that he would be able to mingle in the general population of black people and be accepted as one of them.

He was distressed to find out that even though, to a greater or lesser degree, he shared skin color characteristics with both the Tutsis and Hutus, that what was absolutely vital was to not have the wrong bone structure in your face, and he unfortunately had faint traces of the “wrong” facial bone structure, which put him on the “wrong” side in a population of people who were being hacked to death alive with machetes because they looked different.

He was very much in danger, and he knew it.

He realized then what a precious, precious privilege it had been to be an American his whole life. He saw REAL racism, where the things that were called “racism” in America were not worth a penny of worry in a country where if you had the wrong physical characteristics that put you into a different tribe, you would get worse racism than someone who looked at you nervously.

You would get people who chose to murder you slowly by chopping off a hand, watching you bleed and scream, then chopping off the arm, then the feet, and the legs, and if you were lucky, your head.

When he came back to America, he said publicly “Frankly, I want no part of it” and “Thank God my ancestor got out, because, now, I am not one of them.”

He was excoriated by American blacks who had the same silly fantasy about their “ancient heritage” in Africa that he once held, but did not have the experience he had, which was that people regarded as racists America were quite different from the racists he saw in Rwanda, and he got taste of the real racism in a continent he thought would be free of it to an American black man.

Thomas Sowell wrote about this man’s experience for the Hoover Institute, and Keith Richburg ended up, he says, hating the Somalis “because they betrayed me” and hating himself “for having been so wrong, for setting myself up for the betrayal.”

And in the end, he realized just how wrong his typically American childish fantasies about Africa and Africans were all wrong, and he was disillusioned to realize that racism wasn’t just a “white” thing (many blacks, including him, naively believed that it is impossible for blacks to be “racist”) but came to fully understand that not only could blacks be far more virulently racist than any white person he had ever seen, they were racist for the same reasons...on the basis of the “shade” of the skin, or the bone structure in the face, and worse, they were inclined to express their racism in open, horrible, violent murder.

One can imagine how he felt, coming back to America, the fabled land of racism, and realizing just how non-racist it in reality the USA really is. Worse, to realize the truth that blacks are no better, and may be far, far more worse in their racism, and how they express it, something that made him an “Uncle Tom” to many American blacks and white liberals when he voiced this truth.

This man’s journey though Africa destroyed a lot of his personal totems and sacred cows many black Americans (though not all) have about Africa.