alt Hacker NewsAAVE was an awful term, but "Regional African English" and "Afro-English" is even worse if you're trying to talk about black Americans.
Are you talking about the English of Africans in different parts of Africa? If so, are you including the voices of white and Mediterranean Africans?
I'm confused. As a black American with roots (going back a couple centuries) in the Ark-La-Tex, I would think our dialects would be covered under "Southern American," which makes me suspect that you were referring to me with all of those references to another continent.
Good question, those are all different accents we are pointing out this model does well with, but it also does well with White American accents that are usually represented well, not only the Black voices (including White southern voices).
We are calling out Southern American, and the regional African English (e.g. a person with a regional Nigerian (igbo) accent speaking english, or someone with a regional Kenya (Swahili) accent that is still speaking english). Those are all different but all represented well in this model.
Those were not a catch all for black americans.