Open-access Muniz Sodré’s fascism of color and the persistent thesis of the singularity of Brazilian racism

Abstract

This review analyzes the book O fascismo da cor: uma radiografia do racismo nacional, which aims to criticize the concept of structural racism, by Silvio Almeida, and argue that the slavery social form category would be able to precisely explain the singularity of Brazilian racism. After presenting Muniz Sodré’s main arguments, we argue that the work repeats the theses of the sociology of racial relations of the 1950s and 1960s, which analyzed color prejudice as a pre-modern inheritance of slave society and racism as an ideology. Although Sodré’s book identifies undeniable problems in the concept of structural racism, his proposal suffers from a unitary and excessively narrow conception of social structure, which does not consider the possibility of informal structures of racial inequality at different levels of generalization of meaning: macrostructures, mesostructures, and microstructures. Thus, the book, despite the criticisms of the problems existing in the concept of structural racism, offers an alternative that, in addition to failing to consistently explain Brazilian racism, reproduces the persistent thesis of Brazilian singularity, which is a major obstacle to being able to consistently understand the particularities of Brazilian dilemmas in a modern and global order.

Keywords:
fascism of color; slavery social form; Brazilian-style racism; structural racism; singularity

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