# Political-epistemological lessons  
To close this chapter, I will draw three general political-epistemic lessons from the panoramic and historic view we have discussed of languages of blackness and Africanity in Latin America and the Spanish-speaking Caribbean.  
The first lesson is that, even though there is a great variety of ethnic-racial labels in the Americas, the categories corresponding to anti-black racism, ascriptions of blackness, and attributions of Africanity tend to follow the same logic across the hemisphere. The signifiers, racial discourses, hierarchies and practices of racialization and racism vary, but the ethnic-racial categories defined by a combination of phenotypical and cultural criteria are configured around a three-tier classification-stratification of white, mulato, and black. ${ }^{30}$ In this vein, ethnic-racial discourses and their corresponding racist regimes are worldhistorical phenomena that are global at the same time as they are historically contingent and hence, local, ambiguous, unstable, and contradictory. The continuous transmigration of peoples, discourses, representations, and social movements throughout the Americas and globally creates a space of flows for racial significations and anti-racist politics.  
The second conclusion is that, as a region, Latin America has always been important in the formulation of African diaspora identities and politics. Banging this drum, the adoption by the General Assembly of the United Nations of the term afrodescendiente, coined in Latin America in the late 1980s as a political identity, in the title in Spanish of the International Decade for People of  
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