Mignolo gathers and rewrites earlier essays into a single argument about what he calls the colonial matrix of power, the structure of control laid down in the sixteenth century and still running, now through knowledge and artificial intelligence as much as through territory. His preference for investigation over research is deliberate: the latter borrows the prestige of the hard sciences and their claim on what counts as knowing.

The opening part treats race as a problem made by the classifier rather than the classified, a question of concepts rather than of bodies, and follows it from the Atlantic slave trade through the Holocaust to the disposability of migrants and refugees. Later parts ask whose humanity the language of human rights actually speaks for, chart a shift away from five centuries of Westernization, and set Andean thinkers beside European ones.

The aim throughout is to unsettle the assumptions behind Western knowing and sensing rather than to argue with their content.