African American is kind of a flawed term, it only really means a group of people that have a certain culture, not really much more. Calling a dominican like Ortiz black or african american is what I assume would be the same as seeing an Irish person and calling them French. This all gets too convoluted with hispanics. For instance I'm half Puerto Rican, therefore part hispanic. But within that half, half of them are white and half are black. But all share the same culture(unlike whites and blacks in america). Yet I've been thought of as being Dominican a bunch of times and it annoys me.
tl;dr Race is stupid as hell