Azizi, I appreciate the link to your previous essay, but for me it still doesn't clear up the confusion. I need some definitions, if there are any. Americans whose ancestors were brought to America from Africa as slaves are African-Americans (some write it as African Americans, without the hyphen), right? Does this apply to all of the American continent, or only to the US?

What about Americans whose ancestors came to America from Africa as freemen and/or freewomen, as Obama's father did? Looks like people are using the same term, but is it correct?

My cousin's son is one-quarter Caucasian-American, one-quarter Italian-American (from his mother's side) and half African-Jamaican on his father's side. My cousin is an American citizen, so her son is also, so I guess he's an "African-American" but is he the same "sort" of African-American as a descendant of slaves on a Georgia plantation? Does it depend on whether his father came from Africa or was born in Jamaica to descendants of sugar-plantation slaves? Or does he just get stamped as "black" or "Black American" without taking the other half of his heritage into consideration?