"African American" is, in my subjective opinion, an ethnicity, but it is only tangentially related to skin colour.

Obama, who is semantically clearly African American, doesn't belong to the ethnic group.

I have close friends who are "African Americans", immigrants from West Africa with US citizenship, and they don't either (which can lead to some strange situations, more with blacks than with whites).

Their children, one born in France, one in the US, are an interesting case. I'm guessing they're not, but could easily fake it if they wanted to (They had the luck to grow up in middle-class suburban North Carolina. Is there a "better" place in the US with respect to "race"?)

_{It is rightly acknowledged that people of faith have no monopoly of virtue - Queen Elizabeth II}