Why do we call black people "African-Americans" but call white people "white"?

I call black people black, there is nothing African about them. I don't like being called Irish American, when I go to Ireland I don't tell them I'm Irish I tell them I'm American, it's stupid.

I call black people "black", because that is what "African-American" is meant to mean.

But the people of North Africa along the Mediterranean are not called "African-American", even though they are just as much African. Nor are white people like Teresa Heinz Kerry called "African-American" even though they were born and raised in Africa, unlike the majority of "African-Americans."

So, the term is misleading and inexact, which is why I don't use it.

It would be more correct to just refer to everyone as Americans. That is what
they are. Most black people do not come from Africa.

The original idea was part of a new-age philosophy that many problems in the black community were because of racism....so if you replaced "race" with "culture" the problems would magically go away.

But there was a long-standing struggle in the black community that came to a head in the 1990s and the appropriation of the PC movement (which actually started as part of GHW Bush's "kinder, gentler nation" philosophy) as a tool to push a particular, narrow agenda.

Men like Bill Cosby saw the term African American as something that showed blacks as part of a single American fabric....just as Irish American and Italian American were seen as terms of pride in one's heritage..

Others like Spike Lee saw African American as a culture wholly separate from "white" American culture (the clothing line FUBU, which stands for "For US by US" is a reflection of this attitude.

Ironically..... the struggle within the black community is whether or not they can be part of a "mainstream America" without "surrendering" to a notion that mainstream="white"...or whether or not they can consider themselves "Separate but Equal" on their own terms.

Because black people asked to be called that. As for white people, we do not care what other races call us.

African American is a term by covert racists to mean that blacks aren't fully American citizens because they have black skin and their ancestry were slaves from Africa. It's semantics by prejudiced leftist elitists who hate blacks and think they shouldn't be accepted as 100% American citizens in the the country they were born in when the majority know nothing about African culture but US culture.

LIBS aren't that correct. They should call me a European-american. They only inclided the wrong way,

Clint Eastwood Quotes:
"[Trump’s] onto something, because secretly everybody’s getting tired of political correctness, kissing up.
We’re really in a pussy generation. Everybody’s walking on eggshells. We see people accusing people of being racist and all kinds of stuff. When I grew up, those things weren’t called racist...I’d have to go for Trump … you know… because she’s declared that she’s gonna follow in Obama’s footsteps."

This just my guess, but it might be because a lot of them came over from Africa, and once slavery ended they were considered Americans to. So they started calling them African Americans. (just my guess)

The countries which are present today were not there during the capturing of slaves. The people who were kidnapped and brought to the new world were called African because they came from various parts of AFRICA which had not yet established the political borders you see today.

Some people are called "Anglo-American", some "Italian- American", some "Irish-American, etc. It's conservatives who have divided the world into white an black. Many groups that weren't considered "white" by the xenophobic at the time were the Italian immigrants and others. Now, those who try to put everyone into two groups call them all "white". The people you consider "white" came from all kinds of places. Many you consider "black" came here from the Caribbean Islands and other places, although their distant ancestors may have been from Africa. But all of us are from Africa if you go back far enough- that's where human life started. Even religious people believe we all came from Adam and Eve.