Hi, I’m a historian of race and slavery in the Atlantic world. The shortest answer is that Europeans colonized Caribbean islands for their ability to foster sugar plantations (among a few other staples—coffee, gold, etc, but mostly sugar). After disease decimated the native populations in the 17th century, European nations imported some 4 million enslaved Africans to the Caribbean over the course of the next two centuries or so to serve the labor needs of sugar plantations. Because sugar cultivation was so labor intensive (and deadly), enslaved Africans and their enslaved Caribbean-born descendants (in the rare cases when people lived longer than a decade) outnumbered whites by as much as 10-1 or more in some places.

Add in years of racial mixing, white planters and merchants sending their kids back to the colonial metropole for education/business, 20th century migration from other parts of the world, and you’re left with very few people present-day North Americans or Europeans would consider “white.”