It has to do with culture. It is only where cultural and racial lines just happen to coincide that you get the racial divide.

I think its ridiculous for black activists and revolutionaries to learn Swahili, affect Muslim names, or wear African fashion or grooming styles. Harmless, but ridiculous. Its just as ridiculous as people whose grandparents emigrated here in the early 1900s from Europe walking around in cowboy gear and singing country music.

Culture is not inherited, it is taught. And it certainly can't be manufactured. If you don't have the language, or at least, a strong family connection to relatives who had the language and other cultural baggage of your heritage, you've lost it forever and can't get it back.

America has been here long enough to have a culture, and it is a perfectly legitimate one.If you've been here a long time, you're a part of that culture whether you like it or not. The black community has a distinct culture, because they've been socially isolated from the mainstream for so long, but it is not African.

You may never notice it until you live in another country for some time (not just visit, live, get a job and a drivers's licence, pay bills, date the local girls). Even if you speak their language and look like them, and can fake it there so even the natives can't spot you, you'll soon learn just how American, deep down, you really are. And when you get home you'll see how few of your countrymen really understand what being American is really all about.

Like fish, they cannot really understand the concept of "water".