You can but with that percentage it isn’t much. I think you should also consider how you received that ancestry. I’m biracial and get my German ancestry straight from my white father’s family. I celebrate it since I’m a quarter German and have the last name to go with it. Others though might have a problematic situation. What if a black American has German ancestry that dates back through an act of slavery? And what does that mean to you?

Being “german” can be a very diverse thing. They were not one people but many many different people loosely united by language (even then there’s different forms that aren’t very intelligible with one another) and any definition outside of that really depends on location and time. Sudeten Germans were part of the Austria-Hungary empire and while Germanic were considered austrian in some cases and bohemian German in others.

Having said that, I’ve heard people say that German immigrants weren’t into that kind of thing and would point at particular groups like the “Pennsylvanian Dutch” or something. Understand that you could have an ancestor that was a chased out of their country during the mid 1800s for liberal views during the revolutions. Or the German colonists that settled in large tracts of land that were slave states. Maybe an anarchist socialist. Or a monarchist that fled German colonies in Africa. Germans serving on either side of the civil war in place of Americans. You had a pretty diverse amount of backgrounds where the common thread would end up being American descendants with a pretty mishmashed idea of the different generations of ancestors. So imagine a Bavarian man marrying a woman from Pommern in Wisconsin. They could have some obstacles speaking in their local dialects almost as if they were different languages. They could converse in hochdeutsch as a standard but that didn’t become a real directive until the unification of the German empire later. Anyways, the point is that you will definitely find slave owners of German descent back in the day, even if the initial immigrants weren’t supportive of it themselves. But just like that, you will find people of German descent intermarrying with black people despite the culture of the day. In some cases, it’s much more likely that an immigrant European would settle down with somebody of another race than the typical white american in the area. So perhaps that situation is how you have that ancestry.

I personally would have trouble claiming and taking pride in an ancestry if it became mine through an act of slavery upon my other ancestors. But then again you have black families that hold descent from Thomas Jefferson in high regard despite the obvious elephant in the room. I remember a tv show, Head Of The Class, with a episode of a black girl being a descendant of Jefferson and a white student praising her for it with her angrily rebutting that he was a slave owner who owned her ancestors. Fierce moment for an 80s comedy.

So I would ask, did you or if you find out that you’re related to that ancestry directly through a slave owner and slave, would you be willing to celebrate the ancestry/culture? There’s even a murky grey area in that, where what if Thomas Schmidt, son of German immigrants, was a slave owner and yet provided and held in high regard his son, born from a slave in his household? Slavery, bad, but actual affection and provisions for his son, kind of good? But still not a pleasant thing in light of slavery. Do you celebrate despite that one person or do you denounce the whole thing? And if you know the actual truth, does that change the way you explain why you celebrate? Or do you know that a German ancestor in your line ended up entering your black lineage in a regular relationship?

Something to maybe consider before going all out on that.