ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book shows that despite widespread racial inequality, Black poverty and racial discrimination, Afro-descendants are fighting back by creating new opportunity structures. There are numerous Black organizations, social movements and leaders protesting, pressuring and criticizing key institutions of power. Various branches of government have overtly or covertly oppressed Black people or neglected their core interests. The book examines how the combination of European colonization, contact and conquest of the Indigenous people and the subsequent enslavement of Africans led to racially stratified societies and polities in which Whites and lighter-skinned Latin Americans became the political, economic and cultural elites of the region. It focuses on the Caribbean with emphasis on Cuba, the Dominican Republic and Haiti. Kia Lilly Caldwell argues that Black women are increasingly important political actors in Latin America.
