The Phenomenological Structure of Racial Exploitation and the Silence on Economics
April 28, 2025
systemic exploitation of Black populations in Brazil is not an anomaly but a foundational pillar of economic structures. This exploitation is not merely racial; it is economic at its core, designed to extract labor and value while maintaining a hierarchy that dehumanizes. The very functionality of this system relies on the inferiorization of Black lives, turning them into targets for cheap, disposable labor.
Every economic foundation generates a superstructure: legal, political, ideological, and cultural. These superstructures reinforce racial capitalism by normalizing Black suffering. The legal system criminalizes Blackness, the political system excludes Black voices, and the cultural sphere demonizes African diasporic traditions. Yet, the debate on racism often ignores economics, masking how profit drives oppression.
Where is the discussion on outsourcing, where Black and poor workers are pushed into precarious labor? Where are the voices challenging the 15% Selic rate that strangles the working class while banks profit? The poor face decaying public services, yet the elite debate abstract policies, never the human cost.
This is the perfect crime: an exploitative regime that operates invisibly. Under capitalism, all workers are exploited, but in Brazil, this exploitation is racialized to such a degree that solidarity is fractured. The Black poor are not seen as fully human, let alone as part of the working class.
Meanwhile, mainstream anti-racist movements have abandoned economic critique. When do we discuss how figures like Isaac Newton traded shares in the Company of the Seas, a colonial enterprise profiting from slavery? When do we connect today’s financial elites to the same colonial extraction?
The attacks on public healthcare (SUS) reveal who is deemed expendable. While the periphery suffers, the ruling class enriches itself,just as it did 400 years ago. The tools have changed, but the logic remains: racial capitalism depends on Black dehumanization.
We must reframe racism as an economic weapon. Without dismantling the profit motive behind exploitation, any anti-racist struggle is incomplete. The fight for Black liberation must be a fight against capitalism,or it is no fight at all.
brasil or no brazil, brasil laranja