The impact of WWII and Nazi Germany was without a doubt a significant catalyst for a shift in American racial ideologies. African Americans were celebrated across the globe, and a small global renaissance of black culture reinvigorated African American identity movements and what it meant to be African American. It transformed American black racial identity from that of ex-slave to one of a global subject and producer of culture. Culturalist arguments about race successfully challenged some of the basic assumptions about race by attacking people's belief that race was biological and pointed to the environmental and cultural influences of individual difference and the image of race as deterministic and biological began to dismantle. Scholar W. E. B. Du Bois's model for understanding racial inequality spread as a model for doing research. In particular, his rejection of biology and essentialism as an explanation for racial inequality, was influential.