"African American" is a cultural
self-designation in the USA, not a imposed phrase or a way to tiptoe around race.
If anything, it's meant in the opposite way; by identifying oneself as "African", one is reminding oneself and others that your ancestors very likely arrived here on the slave ships. The "American" reminds oneself and others that you are a citizen with the same rights and responsibilities of any other citizen.
It gradually replaced "Negro" and "Colored" in the USA in the 1970s as more and more folks whose ancestors hailed from Africa decided to celebrate their heritage and reject the use of racist terms; a lot of folks in my generation and younger have "Africanized" names, for example.
I guess that might look odd, if you're in a country where most people are either your color or are "foreign"; in the US, where we have practically every culture and people on the planet hanging out
somewhere, we're always a little torn between celebrating the culture of our ancestors and the fact that most of us are a wide mixture of heritages vs. our essential identities as citizens of the United States.
For African Americans, it's even more complicated, given our very real history of slavery and oppression here.
I can see how that looks like "tiptoeing" around race, based on the literal reading of the language, but it's a lot more complicated than that; groups self-designate in our larger culture to remain culturally distinct within our larger melange structure. For example, a lot of people identify themselves as "Irish Americans", because they're still pretty distinct as a sub-culture and take great pride in their roots.
For a lot of us, however, we just simplify, because our heritage is quite mixed after a few centuries.
For example, I'm a pretty typical American, a little atypical in that my European heritage goes back to well before the Revolution... but if I used that terminology, I'd be a "Swiss German Iroquois Spanish English American", lol.
But that's too long, so I just stick with "white guy", although with my beaky nose and brown eyes, sometimes people think I'm an Eastern European Jew, etc.
It's just how things work here; we're from everywhere, and people here like to remember that for a variety of reasons, some of which are "politically correct" but most of which have to do with cultures wanting to remain distinct here
Anyhow, in the OP's case, he's dealing with a sensitive subject, since officially, a person's race is irrelevant here, but with older people (say, conservative voters in a Southern state) it might skew their perspectives a little in an encounter (for example, his accent might irk some people, if he cold calls them- on the other hand, it might energize others).
Racism here is very much less than it used to be and I'd honestly say that most of the USA is less racist than a lot of Europe and Asia are nowadays, but
talking about it frankly can be risky in politics, if somebody takes offense or uses what you have to say out of context.
Hence why he was asking for frank advice from behind his pseudonym, as it's a sticky subject here- most of us generally don't
like racism and we'd like it to go away, in the abstract, but the reality is often a little more complicated, even in 2014.