Capitalism, Racism, and Inequalities in Brazil

What is the historical origin of racial inequalities in Brazil? Several studies have highlighted the existence of structural racial inequalities in health, education, access to land and housing, as well as in the Brazilian labor market. Far from being a simple legacy of slavery or an epiphenomenon of economic inequalities, these inequalities reflect the place of racism in class exploitation in the country. Drawing on the Marxist and anti-racist theory of Frantz Fanon, this paper argues that the specificity of the colonial situation is characterized by naked violence, driven by the super-exploitation of labor, democratic fragility, and the ontological dehumanization of colonized peoples. In this scenario, racism played a fundamental economic role by imposing a racial distribution of class contradictions.