Wynter's subject is a substitution. From the Renaissance onward, Europe replaced the Christian account of what a human being is with a secular one it called Man, first as the state's rational political subject and later a biological organism selected or dysselected by evolution, then presented this ethnoclass invention as the human as such.

Race, she argues, was made to do the work that distinctions between mortal and immortal, human and divine, had done for other societies. Lacking any bodily correlate, it grounded a new line between humans and those cast as barely human, and it was invented in the Caribbean and the Americas, where indigenous peoples and enslaved Africans became the physical referents of Man's Others.

The stakes are practical: the well-being of the Western and westernized middle classes is taken for that of the species. Working from Fanon's account of sociogeny, Wynter calls for a different description of the human, no longer written from that position.