The position of the African-American (and Caribbean) is I think different. What cultural referents can they adopt with pride other than African ones?

How about African-American or Afro-Caribbean ones? It's not like they failed to create any culture of their own in the New World.

My name comes from Huguenot refugees who arrived in England in the 17th century. There are African-Americans with ancestors who were brought (equally unwillingly) to the Americas even before that. I don't feel any particular reason to ignore everything my folks did in Britian in the intervening centuries in search of some phantom "cultural referent" in French Calvinism.

Bruce Molsky has some intelligent comments about how this played out with musical traditions in the US. A lot of the "Celtic music" thing is thinly disguised racism - its advocates would like American traditional music to be seen as an ethnically pure offshoot of the traditions of some Celtic homeland that never was. As Molsky points out, a heck of a lot of the distinctive sound of American traditional music is of African origin. It was created out of both African traditions and those of the British Isles equally, and the place it was created was in North America itself. It's something both African- and European-Americans could be proud of, if they'd only let themselves.