Is "African American" really a good term to identify Americans of the negro race?

I don’t want to upset any of our African American friends, but at the moment my son is planning to marry a nice gal from South Africa. When he does that, and she gets her naturalization papers, she will be a “true” African American, and she is a white girl. Most of those who call themselves “African American” have never held citizenship in Africa. It would be kind of like me saying that I am a “British American” because my ancestors came from England. The term seems very deceiving to me. When a survey asks if you are hispanic, caucasian, polynesian, asian or “African American”, the latter doesn’t fit as a distinction of heredity, but more a citizenship matter. Is there a better term that would not be derogatory?