Minor errors I can gloss over, what throws me out of a book is when an author goes to great lengths to talk about how something works and gets it completely wrong. In one of the Honor Harrington books David Weber makes a great deal out of how HH has an antique 1911 pistol, and spends (IIRC) most of a chapter talking about how it works. But when it turns out that she needs it for a plot point (sneaking a weapon past detectors that look for energy weapons), she uses it incorrectly without any explanation as to why. If he hadn’t gone into such detail, I wouldn’t even have noticed, but because he did it reached out and slapped me out of the story.
How could they tell the other three were a Northern European, East Indian, and Asian (which would also encompass the East Indian)?
Those were presumably all assessments of their probable ancestry. African-American, however, is a statement both about a person’s ancestry and their current citizenship.
meh, it may be an indication that their genes were predominately African, with some “American” melting pot genes.