Intersections between Race and Class: A Postcolonial Analysis and Implications for Organizational Leaders

Abstract

This article seeks to understand the construction of racial identity in the Brazilian social context and its intersections with social class, aiming to analyze the occurrence of race resignification in this intersectional process, a process called the classification of race herein. Considering that business students will be leaders involved with the elaboration of organizational policies, this article seeks to contribute to the development of racial diversity policies in the field. Interviews were thus held with undergraduate students of management in a Brazilian university. The interviews occurred in focus groups, and data analysis was performed by means of discourse analysis from a postcolonial identity 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 involving 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 the Brazilian society, thus bearing the myth that Brazil is a racial democracy.