He was a disembodied pair of hands on YouTube who said things like "tough as woodpecker lips" or "stiff as a wedding night prick" He'd take apart power tools and see how they were built. He was funny, gained a following and became an asshole grifter.

Given the vise, I suspect he wasn't fucking much of anything.

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lemmy.zip’s image proxy strikes again.

I've seen an American, desperately not trying to sound racist, refer to black people living in Africa as "African Africans".

African-American is pretty awkward but it fits the similarly awkward model of Irish-American, Italian-American. The reason those are more specific should be obvious and horrifying - the vast majority of black Americans have little record of their ancestry before cross-Atlantic transportation. It would be nice if Americans just focused on the American part but these labels were often imposed on them from outside before they were adopted as a matter of spiteful pride from inside. Like LGTBQ Pride, St Patrick's Day parades originally had an element of defiance and protest.

It's useful in AAVE though because it is specifically American as opposed to just "black". There are black slang/vernaculars in the Caribbean, Britain and France for example. Some of it bleeds into AAVE/Global English too - e.g. fam, bruv.

It seems a weird and very specific label applied to people of a very particular skin colour and heritage, to avoid using the word black, even though that’s not, on its own, a racist term. It’s just a descriptive visual trait, like tall, thin, white, muscly, gaunt, etc.

I would look at how african americans label themselves. How white people label them is irrelevant to the discussion imo.

I agree it's often used because white people are afraid of using the term Black even when individuals indicate they prefer it, but I believe part of the reason it came to be was to refer specifically to people who descended from enslaved people. They were kidnapped and their descendants don't know exactly from where, so the term is very broad.

It's funny, you had the same thoughts as the rappers in this hip hop song:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3ZbxQR4SYA&t=260

There was a big push to make "African American" the politically correct term in the late 00s, but for basically every reason you mentioned, it didn't quite catch.

The term AAVE was coined in 1973 as a replacement for "ebonics" and it spread throughout the 80s and 90s. There's a bunch more info about it on the wiki and I don't think I can succinctly summarize it, but it's an interesting read.