ABSTRACT
The goal of this article is to analyze how the Brazilian anti-racism legal mechanisms have been working and the main obstacles to its application vis-à-vis the social dynamics of racial stigma and racial insults. Our argument is that there is a difficulty in reconciling the categories of the law and the way judges interpret it with the actual shape of Brazilian racism in which prevails subtle acts of discrimination and the use of racial insults in everyday situations.
KEYWORDS:
racism; anti-racism public policies in Brazil; racial insult; court decisions; empirical research in law