This proposal is situated within a regional and global context characterized by profound socioeconomic, political, and cultural transformations that reinforce the patterns of inequality historically prevalent in Latin America and the Caribbean. In this scenario, structural racism, and specifically anti-Black racism, continue to operate as central pillars of the regimes of domination inherited from colonialism, updated today through new forms of social discipline, territorial control, precarious living conditions, and the systematic criminalization of Afro-descendant populations.

Far from being a residual dimension of inequality, racialization structures modes of accumulation, the dynamics of extractivism, the organization of the labor market, security policies, educational systems, and knowledge production mechanisms. Afro-descendant populations in the Global South continue to be disproportionately affected by structural poverty, informal work, mass incarceration, police violence, territorial displacement, and restricted access to fundamental rights. Within this framework, racism cannot be understood as an isolated cultural phenomenon, but rather as a technology of governance that articulates economic exploitation, political subordination, and symbolic dehumanization.

The region is also undergoing a process of political realignment marked by the rise of authoritarian, conservative, and openly anti-racist projects, accompanied by a resurgence of colonialist discourses in the form of renewed neo-Hispanism, exclusionary nationalisms, cultural supremacisms, and appeals to homogenizing narratives that revive historical racial hierarchies. This authoritarian shift has direct consequences for public policies aimed at racial equality, affirmative action, historical reparations programs, and international human rights commitments, which are systematically dismantled or emptied of meaning under new rationales of austerity, punitivism, and racial depoliticization.

In this scenario, the weakening of democratic consensus coexists with the strengthening of punitive and social control mechanisms that disproportionately affect Afro-descendant populations, deepening the structural link between racism, state violence, and necropolitics. More than isolated phenomena, the criminalization of racialized territories, the militarization of daily life, and the systematic production of disposable subjectivities constitute a new phase of racial capitalism. From this perspective, necropolitics is not an exception but a governing rationale, and its most brutal expression takes the historical and contemporary form of anti-Black genocide: a persistent, administered, and naturalized policy of death that decides which lives are protected and which can be eliminated without social outcry.

Naming the anti-Black genocide constitutes a political and epistemological intervention of the first order. It involves challenging the language of power that translates racial violence into technical and legal euphemisms—"excesses," "insecurity," "confrontations"—and making visible its structural character as a long-term regime that permeates the economies, subjectivities, and institutions of the modern/colonial world-system. The anti-Black genocide is not only physical death but also social, symbolic, and political death: it is the production of extreme vulnerability, historical erasure, and the systematic denial of humanity.

In response to this scenario, the Working Group adopts a critical anti-racist perspective, understood not as a moral practice or a superficial policy of recognition, but as an intellectual project aimed at dismantling the historical power structures that sustain racial inequality. This approach is articulated with Black radicalism, Afro-descendant political traditions, and Black and Afro-diasporic feminisms, producing a situated reading that simultaneously questions capitalism, coloniality, patriarchy, and racism as a relational framework of domination.

Furthermore, the Working Group proposes to address Afro-descendants not as a passive object of public policy but as an epistemic, political, and historical subject of critical thought production. From this perspective, Black epistemologies are reclaimed as legitimate sources of social, political, and philosophical knowledge, not as objects to be folklorized or as "alternative knowledge," but as theoretical frameworks capable of challenging the central categories of contemporary social sciences.

At this point, it is crucial to emphasize that the persistence of structural racism is also explained by the continued existence of epistemic racism, which hierarchizes knowledge, invalidates Afro-descendant historical experiences, and reproduces a racial division of knowledge. The coloniality of knowledge, far from being a legacy of the past, continues to operate as an active mechanism of academic Eurocentrism and epistemic racism. Combating epistemic racism does not simply involve incorporating Afro-descendant authors or themes, but rather challenging the categorical frameworks from which problems are constructed, questions are formulated, and answers are legitimized.

In this sense, the centrality of the Global South refers not only to a geographical location, but also to a political-epistemic positioning that recognizes in the historical experiences of Afro-descendant subordination and resistance a privileged interpretive key to the contemporary world order. Latin America and the Caribbean constitute a historical laboratory where coloniality, struggles for self-determination, contested reparations processes, and still unfinished projects of racial democracy converge.

Finally, the Working Group aims to intervene in the regional public debate by promoting a substantive notion of democracy that transcends institutional reductionism and is articulated with racial justice, material redistribution, political recognition, and the radical transformation of power structures. Within this framework, historical reparations are understood as an emancipatory political horizon, not as compensatory policy: to repair is to transform, to decolonize is to reconfigure, and to fight racism is to contest the very meaning of humanity. Thus, the articulation between critical thought, academic production, public advocacy, and dialogue with social movements is fundamental to challenging racist common sense, strengthening anti-racist agendas, and contributing to the construction of emancipatory projects in the Global South.

The Working Group's proposal is rooted in a critical tradition that conceives of racism not as a peripheral, cultural, or residual phenomenon, but as a historical structure constitutive of modern capitalism, the nation-state, and contemporary democracies. From this perspective, the Working Group distances itself from liberal conceptions of racism as a moral deviation or a deficit of inclusion, and conceptualizes it as an organizing principle of political and economic modernity. In Latin America and the Caribbean, this matrix is ​​expressed in the persistent racialization of citizenship, labor, territory, and differential access to rights, producing democracies that are formally inclusive but materially hierarchical and racially stratified. From this perspective, the Working Group draws on three major, interconnected theoretical frameworks: Black radicalism, Black Marxism, and critical race theory, integrated into a contemporary critique of neoliberalism as a racial regime of government.

Black radicalism constitutes a transnational political and intellectual tradition that has conceived of race as a structuring category of modern domination and as the core of alternative emancipatory projects. From C.L.R. James to Angela Davis, from Marcus Garvey to Audre Lorde, this current has been central to understanding that the anti-racist struggle is inseparable from the critique of capitalism, colonialism, and the global geopolitical order. It is not a politics of recognition, but a political philosophy of racial liberation.

Within this tradition, the Caribbean occupies an irreplaceable theoretical and political place in developing a critique of colonial modernity based on the experiences of enslavement, revolution, and Black resistance. Afro-Caribbean thought is not a peripheral offshoot of European theories, but rather one of the foundational elements of modern political theory. Jean-Louis Vastey's work from Haiti, in the post-revolutionary context, anticipates a radical critique of racialized democracy, colonial humanism, and the political hypocrisy of European powers. His work allows us to understand Haiti not only as a historical event, but also as an epistemic turning point in Western modernity.

Likewise, George Padmore, CLR James, and Walter Rodney developed a critique of imperialism, bourgeois nationalism, and colonial racism from a materialist, internationalist, and Black perspective on history. Their contributions allow us to understand the African diaspora not as a dispersed cultural community, but as a historical and political subject of global capitalism. Within this framework, the Caribbean is not a margin of the world-system, but one of its fundamental historical laboratories: plantation, enslavement, rebellion, revolution, and migration are key analytical elements for understanding current configurations of racial power.

Black Marxism, as formulated by Cedric Robinson, constitutes the second pillar of the Working Group. This tradition challenges the supposed universalism of classical political economy and demonstrates that modern capitalism emerges as racial capitalism. There is no accumulation without racialization; there is no class without race. This perspective is central to understanding contemporary processes of precarization, mass incarceration, territorial dispossession, and criminalization of Afro-descendant populations in Latin America and the Caribbean, as well as to reinterpreting regional history through the lens of Black resistance as a driving force for social transformation.

The third theoretical framework is critical race theory, which provides conceptual tools for analyzing how racism is embedded in legal structures, citizenship regimes, and democratic political architectures. The notion of the racial contract, formulated by Charles Mill, allows us to demystify the idea that liberal democracy is founded on universal agreements, showing that, historically, these pacts have been racially differentiated. Black populations were constituted as outsiders to full citizenship, even when formally integrated into the political order.

In dialogue with these frameworks, the Working Group incorporates a critique of neoliberalism as a contemporary phase of racial capitalism. Neoliberalism does not eliminate racial hierarchies; it reconfigures them under new technologies of governance. Inequality is presented as individual responsibility, exclusion as subjective failure, and state violence as a security policy. The distinction between radical antiracism and neoliberal antiracism is fundamental here: while the former seeks to dismantle structures of racial and economic power, the latter merely manages diversity without modifying the material conditions that produce subalternity. In this sense, the contemporary advance of radicalized right-wing movements does not represent a break with the racial order, but rather its radicalization under the guise of security, merit, tradition, and order.

Black feminist and decolonial thought—with authors like Ochy Curiel and Sylvia Wynter—offers a radical critique of the coloniality of gender, subjectivity, and knowledge. These perspectives allow us to understand that racism operates not only at the institutional or economic level, but also in the very production of the human, establishing ontological hierarchies between lives deemed worthy and expendable. The critique of epistemic racism occupies a central place in the Working Group: there is no anti-racism without the decolonization of knowledge.

Finally, the Global South perspective adopted by the GT does not refer exclusively to a geographical location, but to an epistemological and political stance: producing theory from the historical experiences of racialized populations, challenging the Eurocentric academic canon, and affirming Black thought as universal thought from below.

From this articulation between theory, history, and politics, the Working Group aims to consolidate an anti-racist research field capable of influencing regional public debate, intervening in the design of public policies, and challenging prevailing ideological narratives, understanding that there is no democracy without racial justice, nor emancipation without the radical decolonization of knowledge and power. The Working Group does not intend to apply existing theories to local contexts, but rather to produce situated anti-racist theory from Latin America and the Caribbean to the world.