Nevertheless, in view of racial superstructures, particular definitions are often applied by State authority beyond personal self-definitions in order to exclude identification. The 2017 case of athlete Tiger Woods, famous for his excellence in the game of golf, is illustrative. Even though throughout his life Woods had resisted being defined as 'black', when arrested for driving while intoxicated, the State via the police booking system fixed the racial descriptor 'black' as his identity. Ibram X. Kendi's Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America (2016) offers a panoramic view of the development of racism throughout North American history and is a good source for examining this question in the context of the United States of America, particularly when the rise to power in 2008 of a black president, Barack Obama, failed to halt the practices of extreme racism. Instead, this claim to black political empowerment actually exacerbated virulent forms of racism, culminating in a new reassertion of white nationalism and racism with a president who, in 2016, ran for office precisely on a disparagement of a series of racial groups.  
In the continental African case, in situations of extreme racism, as was apartheid, significantly, black counter-assertion was tied to political activism also in a movement for Black Power. In the African context, it would be linked to processes of decolonization and heightened consciousness, as articulated by Steve Biko in the formation of the Black Consciousness Movement in South Africa in the 1970s, to reclaim blackness in the face of apartheid's overt oppressive practices.  
Nonetheless, there is another permutation in this regard, as offered by Wole Soyinka, who indicates in 'The African world and the ethnocultural debate' (1985) that there existed in African cultures positive languaging and associations for describing black peoples (enia dudu), including in his own Yoruba culture, as well as in other West African language groups. For him, blackness as an identity  
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