Black as an assertion and as a descriptor created a 'transnational motion [...] mobilized as such a powerful unifying concept full of layers and different temporalities' (Crawford, 2015, p. 23). Blackness then became also operational strategically in the context of the overarching construction of whiteness. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides examples in his Between the World and Me (2015) when he describes people 'who think they are white' as operating with historical privilege and his black identity as therefore contestatory, but with little hope for transcendence. Bell hooks had earlier attempted, in the rise of postmodern discourse, to complicate the meaning of blackness to allow room for 'multiple black identities' and 'varied black experience' and any 'colonial imperialist  
paradigms of black identity which represent blackness one-dimensionally'. ${ }^{3}$ Subsequently, Manning Marable (2008) would define a 'transnational blackness' and a 'global color line', advancing W. E. B. Du Bois' 'color line' demarcation, which the latter had asserted at the 1900 pan-African conference in London. For Marable, transnational political-economic inequities have created a kind of 'global apartheid', but simultaneously there is a blackness which operates beyond boundaries as a 'social site for resistance only within transnational and Pan-African contexts' (p.3).