Banca de DEFESA: ALINE SANTANA ALVES

RACE RELATIONS AND RACISM IN CONFIGURATION OF THE BRAZILIAN TAX SYSTEM

Racist taxation. Whiteness. Race Relationship. Tax regressivity.

Assuming that the Brazilian tax system favors the concentration of wealth and the increase of
socio-racial inequalities, this work investigates why taxation in Brazil is consolidated in order
to maintain and expand the economic privileges of national elites. Through an interdisciplinary
study, it appears that these economic elites are the main beneficiaries of whiteness – which is a
system based on the social meaning of race, in which white subjects are put to a clear advantage
over non-whites. Therefore, the focus of the study is eminently racial, facing how and how
much racial relations and institutional racism contributed to the current formation of the
Brazilian tax system. These racially focused questions arise because, even to the detriment of
technique, tax collection and constitutional principles, this taxation configuration in favor of
whiteness, and to the manifest detriment of the black population, still remains practically
untouched. And the most evident manifestation of these distortions found in Brazilian taxation
is the application of the principle of ability to pay in reverse: it’s the poorest population (mostly
black) that bears the highest tax burden, while the richest (practically all white) proportionally
contribute less. Thus, the proposal is to reason the tax system and taxation with focus on racial
relations and racism, by exposing cases and evaluating the racist institutional mechanisms used
both throughout the national formation and today. More important than evaluating each tax
individually, it’s essential to stick to the taxation and political-legal spirit that the State has
proposed to defend and apply since the mid-19th century.