Your choice to misinterpret his point in such a disingenuously literal way does express an opinion -- an opinion that you're unwilling to acknowledge the reality and the problem of racial stereotyping. Joe was doing nothing so simple as to imply that those things no longer exist; that's a deliberately reductive misreading in order to ridicule the point rather than acknowledge and address it honestly. The point is not at all about their existence in Africa, it's about the virtual nonexistence of any other image of Africa in American media.
Here is what Joe said:
That is certainly not an assertion that such things don't exist in Africa. It is contrasting those images of a primitive and wild Africa with the real-world fact that Africa in 2015 is as modern as any other part of the world. The point is not whether huts and lions still exist, the point is whether Western media is able or willing to acknowledge that African modernity exists. And by refusing to recognize that that's what this conversation is about, instead retreating behind the pretense that this is somehow about the existence of wildlife, you are making a conscious choice to attempt to avoid or trivialize a frank discussion of racial issues, and that absolutely does express an opinion.
If the people from your ancestral country consistently had their accomplishments and their entire civilization ignored by the world's media, if the place that defined your heritage and identity were constantly portrayed as if it had never gotten out of the Stone Age, if most people in the developed world had never even heard of your country but just thought of it as part of an undifferentiated, wild continent, maybe then you would not find it so humorous, or be so mind-numbingly blind to what we're talking about here.
Just because you don't understand how racism hurts people, that doesn't mean they're wrong to react badly to it. It just means you don't understand. Ignorance is not a moral high ground. You're not more right than us just because your perspective is narrower. And maybe if you tried listening rather than laughing, you wouldn't have such a hard time understanding.
