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• African American
  African American

  noun

  an American with Black African ancestry.
• African-American
  African-American

  noun

  an American of African descent

African American

American  

[af-ri-kuhn uh-mer-i-kuhn] / ˈæf rɪ kən əˈmɛr ɪ kən /

Sometimes Aframerican

noun

1. an American with Black African ancestry.

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adjective

1. of or relating to African Americans.

2. African-American, occurring between the United States and Africa.

   Several international charities are promoting African-American cooperation in expanding access to safe drinking water.

African-American British  

noun

1. an American of African descent

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adjective

1. of or relating to Americans of African descent

Usage

During the 1980s, many Americans sought to display pride in their immigrant origins. Linguistically, this brought about a brief period of short-form hyphenated designations, like Italo-Americans and Greco-Americans. The Black community also embraced the existing term Afro-American, a label that emphasized geographical or ethnic heritage over skin color. The related label, African American, also saw an increase in use among activists in the 1970s and 1980s. African American was even more widely adopted in the late 1980s and throughout the 1990s after high-profile Black leaders advocated for it, arguing, as Jesse Jackson did, that the term brought “proper historical context” and had “cultural integrity.” See Black ¹.

This is the currently preferred term in the US for people of African ancestry

Etymology

Origin of African American

An Americanism dating back to 1780–90

Example Sentences

See Examples For:

African American African-American

To market their goods, they turned to an informal network of African American artists, staging pop-up exhibitions in people’s homes and in other impromptu locations.

From Los Angeles Times ● Jul. 27, 2026

In Tuskegee, a rural Alabama city with less than 9,000 people, over 80% of them African American, nearly one in three people live in poverty.

From BBC ● Jul. 18, 2026

In our Valley Stream, Long Island home, my youthful 80-year-old, African American mother and I — her Gen X son and facial clone — comment on each episode like armchair judges.

From Salon ● Jun. 15, 2026

The crew will be rounded out by African American Andre Douglas and US astronaut of Salvadoran descent Frank Rubio.

From Barron's ● Jun. 9, 2026

Young African American men were the only group to experience a steep increase in joblessness between 1980 and 2000, a development directly traceable to the increase in the penal population.

From "The New Jim Crow" by Michelle Alexander

The iconoclastic novels of Toni Morrison update the Gothic tradition with African-American folklore.

From The Wall Street Journal ● Jun. 19, 2026

"For an African-American that started playing soccer at 12 years of age, to make it to not just the national team but the World Cup and start - you can't even write that," he says.

From BBC ● Jun. 6, 2026

A statue of him stands in Morningside Park; at the time of its unveiling in 1988, it was the largest public statue of an African-American in the country.

From Salon ● May 31, 2026

All subjects were born to African-American and Latino mothers and had detectable levels of CPF in their umbilical cord blood.

From Science Daily ● May 21, 2026

But Hitler’s superior Aryan-race theories were shattered by a young African-American college student named Jesse Owens, who won an unprecedented four gold medals in track events.

From "Hitler Youth: Growing Up in Hitler's Shadow" by Susan Campbell Bartoletti