Chirol does a pretty good deconstruction of why racial identification is, in fact, racist.
Lastly, on that point, I will never use the term African-American because it is misused. Only someone who is actually African (say from Nigeria, Malawi etc) and immigrated to the US could MAYBE be called so. But honestly, if you’ve immigrated, you are American now, and nothing else. Blacks are not African in any sense of the word. They’ve never visited Africa, speak no African language, know nothing of their “real” home or its culture and in fact are the product of many mixed African countries. Similarly, there is no such thing European-American for whites. Most everyone who claims to be Scottish, English, German or Italian couldn’t point out that country on a map or name its capital, much less argue they have anything at all in common with those countries culturally, linguistically and so forth.
I liked the SNL skit where Charlize Theron, a recent US citizen claimed that she was African-American while talking to Chris Rock. 🙂