As an Australian, the American vocabulary of politically-correct racial terminology seems backwards.

"African-American" and "people of colour" sound offensive.

"People of color" sounds wrong because it suggests a property "color" that all other races possess which the white race does not have. It makes us into the special ones, while the rest are different. Also, explain to me why "colored" is an atrocious word to say, but "people of color" (which sounds almost exactly the same) is fine. Why do we not just say "non-white"? To refer to everyone who is not asian, we say "non-Asian", everyone who is not black is "non-black", etc - so saying "non-white" shouldn't be regarded as "normalising whiteness", rather "people of color" should be regarded as "normalising whiteness", and adopting the "non" prefix across all ethnicities would be consistent and give preference to no race. We want to say "everyone who isn't white", so why don't we just say it explicitly? Being apologetic and saying what we mean in a roundabout way is being disingenuous - in my view its un-PC because it's trying too hard to be sensitive to non-white persons - the extra sensitivity and the apologeticness reeks of patronising white guilt.

"African-American" avoids referring to the characteristic that is most salient about black people - their dark skin. Therefore it seems to be unnecessarily euphemising blackness - as if it were an undesirable trait that we should not mention. I'd much rather say "black" because it's explicit and unapologetic and doesn't inaccurately identify a person's origins.

The problem with the terms as they now stand is - I believe - that they were made up by mostly white academics who accept that white people and everyone else is equal, but who were still conquering some slight prejudice.