An ethnic category in the United States that refers to all peoples who can trace part or whole of their ancestry to the peoples of Africa (excluding Afro-Arabs and Afro-Asians) prior to the European intrusion in that continent. In different time periods they have been variously referred to as blacks, Negroes, and Coloreds. (See also Africans.) [1]
[1]. See the excellent article by Hanchard (1990) that discusses the contested terrain of nomenclature vis-à-vis U.S. African Americans, as well as the ideologically loaded conventional practice of the designation of United States as “America.”