In high school I made the decision to identify as both African-American and Ethiopian-American because my parents may both be of African lineage but culturally the difference is staggering.

My mom's family is Creole from Louisiana and have a long history in African-American churches in that state and Alabama. We have something like 250 relatives still in Louisiana and then 50 or so in CA which is mostly my grandmother & her siblings and their children.

My father immigrated to the US in his early 20s with most of his siblings from Ethiopia which had to do with my family being pretty big supporters of Empress Zewditu that saw a lot of their influence lost in the 30s then the 70s famine hit.

Culturally living in these two homes (they divorced when I was 2) was as fucking different as night and day and to describe both as African-American just didn't work. For my mother absolutely but western cultural understanding of blackness didn't hold with my father.

This is all to say that yes there is a cultural difference between Black and African-American and neither is superior to the other (though sometimes people in whiever group think they are and I've caught it from both sides my whole life).

The problem really is the idea that we are monolithic and that's not the case while there is a global anti-blackness that underlines all of our experiences the diaspora had wildly different experiences depending on lineage, position, location and a host of other things.

TLDR: Blackness can be universal but being African-American is not.