Why do African-Americans seem to have lighter skin tones than Africans?
To begin with:there are various African skin-tones! Just a few examples:In fact - the most indigenous group in Africa are the bronze skinned Khoisan peopleIn countries close to the equator, you have more darker skinned peoples, which is self-explanatory. For example the Nuer of South Sudan, who are part of the Nilotic-Sudanic branch of African peopleThe indigenous people of the Sahara - such as the Tuareg people…The Nubian people (today Egypt and Sudan)…And the people who belong to the Niger-Congo (aka “Bantu”) family of cultures and languages, which is the most widely distributed group in AfricaAfrican-Americans mostly descend from the West Coast of Africa, especially the areas that today make Ghana, Nigeria, Senegal, Gambia and so on. After they were kidnapped to America by the European and American human trafficking syndicates, they were held as slaves for many generations. Slave owners would sometimes rape the women and grant some privileges to their lighter skinned offspring, while not really acknowledging responsibility and fatherhood.Unlike in South Africa, where the lighter skinned offspring of Europeans and Africans were classified as a separate social group (“Coloureds”), the white Americans used the “one-drop rule”. They considered black to be a pollutant that takes away the pureness of whiteness, so everyone who had some known African ancestry was considered black (or “negro”).So, the mixed (half-white, half-black) offspring would usually assimilate into the wider black community and bring in their whiteness into the Black American population.Since America has been a racially desegregated area for some decades now, there is of course now also free inter-marriage between consenting adults, which adds to the diversity to the population.One of the foremost leaders for the emancipation of Black Americans had in fact some very obvious European ancestry (his mother descended from mixed offspring of an involuntary slave owner - slave woman relationship as far as I memorized from his autobiography)