Racism in Brazil: from hypothesis to premise, without ever becoming an object

Abstract

The area study of race relations is one of the oldest and most consolidated in Brazilian Social Sciences. Yet paradoxically, there is still little research focused on understanding and explaining Brazil’s racism, its mechanisms and characteristics. In addition to illustrating these claims, this text aims to explain why the mechanisms of racial discrimination still manage to escape the radar of sociology and, above all, to outline the general lines of a research agenda that takes discrimination as an object of investigation. It seems that racial discrimination stopped being a research hypothesis, reformulated and tested in different ways between the 1970s and 1990s, to become a premise in the area from the 2000s onwards. However, this came to be without racism being properly constructed as an object of sociological research itself.