The descriptor 'black', then, which gives us the noun 'blackness' as one of the primary vectors of racialization, has a long trajectory, particularly in the New World context. Following transatlantic slavery, Africans displaced from their varying locations and transplanted into a variety of New World locations were described in terms that cast aside their historical self-definitions and placed in a category of, first, 'cargo', then 'enslaved', 'negroes', and 'niggers' in the most offensive representations. These same subordinated subjects began to claim a continental identity as Africans. In early self-representations, for example, in the poetry of Phillis Wheatley (c.1753-1784), black people in the United States of America consistently referred to themselves as either African or Ethiopian. Black churches founded before the end of slavery in the United States and as early as 1816 self-describe as African, as in the founding of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, when black people left the Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia in 1787 to form their own Christian denomination. In the Caribbean, African peoples have continued to refer to themselves using their pre-enslavement African nation identities up to the contemporary period. ${ }^{2}$  
The languaging of formal and global self-redefinition is significant, as it indicates shifting political realities and knowledge acquisition. Names and terms for self-naming have moved through a variety of rejections and reclamations. One such repudiation is to be found in Richard B. Moore's The Name 'Negro': Its Origin and Evil Use (1960). He indicates that 'the same word "negroes" was used for both meanings in Portuguese and Spanish', the former being the first to enslave African peoples and to call them 'negroes' (initially an adjective which means 'black'), 'whereas in English "negroes" was generally used for slaves  
[^0]