Where is the Golden ticket ? <| sep |> mine was shake spear <| sep |> A few American ' s have a tendency to say that they ' re country of ancestry American . It ' s a sense of this is where my family comes from . They ' re of that decent and proud of it . Even if they ' ve never been to the country , their family lines have passed down things like recipes and old country tales . However , most don ' t say they are Irish , Italian , German American , but we still know where our main family lines have come from EnglishGerman . However , black Americans can ' t say what country their family is from , because there is no record beyond where they were dropped off by a ship . They can ' t say they are from Niger , Congo , Gambia , etc because they literally don ' t know . All they have is that they were taken from Africa to America and that is their ancestry . However , I think you ' re more asking why they choose to even describe themselves as African American rather than Black American or just Black . Honestly , I don ' t know . Black has a small derogatory connotation to it from the days of segregation . Which don ' t forget , that was only a few decades ago . I suppose it ' s just a way to not be called something that signified a bad time in history .