One commonly suppressed inconvenient fact about Africa is that it's home to a huge spread of skin tones and that the northern coast has pretty much always been """""white""""", given that most of its native peoples have the same or similar complexion as southern europeans, due their shared access to the mediterranean.

Carthage is another frequently black-washed empire like Egypt simply because it was located in modern-day Tunisia even though its peoples were mostly a mix of lebanese (also natively light-skinned, mind you), roman, and greek.

But people in the U.S. are taught that African=Coal Black and that misconception spread like wildfire through Hollywood to much of Europe.

Ironically, fully integrated children of African Immigrants (much like Arabs and people from the Levant) are treated by Americans as fully indistinguishable from the descendents of western, central, and northern europeans

Even in Britain, most people don't realize that Farrokh Bulsara, the vocalist for the band Queen, is "African", being born in what is now the coast of Tanzania to Parsi (an Indo-Iranian ethno-religious group native to that region among others) parents

Two other prominent examples where ignorant white californians often think "why are you white" when hearing where their ancestors came from are Steven Paul al-Jandali, founder and CEO of Apple (Jobs is the surname of his adopted parents) and noted "white supremacist recruiter" Jon Aryan Jafari (Jontron, obviously)

> americans not knowing about other countries
damn, who knew