[1] The concept identifies the racial, political and social hierarchical orders imposed by European colonialism in Latin America that prescribed value to certain peoples/societies while disenfranchising others.
Quijano argues that the colonial structure of power resulted in a caste system, where Spaniards were ranked at the top and those that they conquered at the bottom due to their different phenotypic traits and a culture presumed to be inferior.
Maria Lugones expands the definition of coloniality of power by noting that it imposes values and expectations on gender as well,[3] in particular related to the European ranking of women as inferior to men.
[4] The concept was also expanded upon by Ramón Grosfoguel, Walter Mignolo, Sylvia Wynter, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Santiago Castro-Gómez, Catherine Walsh, Roberto Hernández, and María Lugones.
The important distinction in the concept of coloniality of power is the ways that this heterogeneous structural process shaped the modern world.
[7] Coloniality of power reveals the hidden side of modernity[8] and the modern/colonial/capitalist-world system[9] which is entangled with and constitutive of an international division of labor between Europeans and non-Europeans.
In this racial structure inferiority and superiority was ascribed based on phenotypes and skin colors, which colonialists claimed to be innate biological traits.
Quijano (p. 536) notes that: "In some cases, the Indian nobility, a reduced minority, was exempted from serfdom and received special treatment owing to their roles as intermediaries with the dominant race...
Following the enrolments of Inuit knowledges into dominant scientific practices, Noble demonstrates how this milieu sustains the other by maintaining a dialogue between the self and the other, so "always ensuring by whatever flexible means, that the other remains other, partially welcomed into the arrangement but necessarily in a subordinate position, subjugated, inscribed as other by self, thereby securing the power position of self" in a culturally resilient, yet continuously oppressive way.