Wynter starts from the pairing Coulthard drew between negritude and indigenismo, twentieth-century movements that answered colonial assumptions of racial and cultural superiority by asserting a distinct perspective of their own. Both arose, she argues, where running down a people's culture served to cheapen its labour.

That devaluation she traces to the conquest and to arguments like Sepúlveda's that peoples without writing had no culture and so barely counted as human — a myth of the cultural void by which European culture became a synonym for humanity, and the press finished what the gun began. Cultural racism, on this reading, is organic to Western capitalism, and the plantation turned the African captive from a person of defined status into labour power priced for a world market.

Her central case is Haiti, where Price-Mars found African belief surviving under the worst conditions. Wynter calls that process indigenization: the making of a people native to the ground they fought over.