I keep seeing Americans on TV News using the term "African American" as some sort of universal term for black people. It's getting more prevalent.

For example (not a particularly nice context but anyway...) a guy trying to blow up a plane yesterday was seen by one of the passengers. She said she saw an "African American" guy getting arrested. He was a Nigerian guy actually, but she instinctively used this (politically correct?) completely wrong term for him.

And even more weird, during an exhibition of art in New York a few years ago, a Black Madonna painting (yes a middle-eastern woman from 2000 years ago, painted as a black person by an English artist) was described by an American critic as "a lovely African American woman"

It's also notable that it explicitly means only 'black' - i.e. it isn't applied to Africans from Morocco or Algeria, it isn't applied to Charlize Theron, and I suspect that whether or not it would be applied to say a Somali or Egyptian person would entirely depend on their racial background, not the continent they come from.

Can someone please announce to the citizens of the US that there are whole continents full of people who are black and are NOT African American? You're taking racism to new levels in the name of political wrongness!