The Construction of Race in Brazil: Uncovering Structural Inequalities

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the construction of racial identity in the Brazilian social context and its intersections with social class, aiming to analyse the occurrence of race resignification in this intersectional process, a process called the classification of race herein. Focus groups were held with undergraduate management students from a Brazilian university. The data were analysed from a postcolonial perspective, which allowed us to conclude that the boundaries between race and class are quite tenuous, to the point that racial aspects are reduced to merely being questions of social class. At the same time, social class acts as a form of whitening. The reduction of race to social class is a strategy of denying race as a social marker that produces inequalities and denying the existence of structural racism in Brazilian society. However, despite this strategy of denial, it was found that work is highly structurally racialized in Brazil.