"African American" or "Black"

In a January 2011 NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, 42% of respondents said they preferred to be called black, 35% said African American and 13% said it doesn't make any difference, and 7% chose "some other term"

The article went on to say that this younger generation of people preferred to be called "black" instead of "african american" because of many reasons.  1) "african american" sort of screams this political correctedness 2) or it is a word that people who aren't black use to describe black people 3) it is a political tool.  In a Senate race against Obama in 2004, Alan Keyes implied that Obama could not clam to share Keyes' "African American heritage" because Keyes' ancestors were slaves.  During the Democratic presidential primary, some Hilary Rodham Clinton supporters made the same charge.  Last year, Herman Cain, then a Republican presidential candidate sought to contrast his roots in the Jim Crow south with Obama's history and he shunned the label African American in favor of "American black conservative."  Then there are some white Americans who were born in Africa.  Paulo Seriodo is a U.S. citizen born in Mozambique to parents from Portugal.  In 2009, he filed a law suit against his medical school, which he said suspended him after a dispute with black classmates over whether Seriodo could call himself African American.  "It does not matter if I'm from Africa and they are not" wrote Seriodo at the time. "They are not allowing me to be African American!"  And so, the saga of the name continues.