In 2020, news concerning a major Brazilian retail company caused quite a stir. In September of that year, Magalu (Magazine Luiza) announced the launch of its 2021 Trainee Program. This was nothing out of the ordinary in the business world, except for an innovation introduced on that occasion: the positions would be exclusively for black candidates. As soon as the program was announced, a heated controversy erupted within public debate. Among the arguments put forward in the discussion was an old favorite in race studies and the anti-racist struggle: the accusation of reverse racism! On social media there was a proliferation of questions such as: “What if the program was aimed solely at young white people?”

The perspective was echoed by representatives from a variety of social sectors. Ana Luiza Fischer Teixeira de Souza Mendonça, a judge at the Regional Labor Court of Minas Gerais and one of the coordinators of the High Labor Studies Group (GAET) of the Ministry of Economy at the time, asked ironically on her Twitter profile: “And this racism, is it good?” She then responded: “Discrimination in hiring based on skin color: inadmissible … In my Constitution, this is still prohibited” (Narcizo, 2020).

Such a position of the magistrate refers to the debate that erupted in Brazilian society at the beginning of this century regarding the adoption of affirmative action policies for the access of black and indigenous people to public universities. At that time, despite the positions regarding the relevance or not of such policies dividing Brazilian society and even the community of social scientists between supporters (Silva & Silvério, 2003) and opponents (Frey et al., 2007) of their appropriateness, the judgment of their constitutionality by the Federal Supreme Court resulted in a decision affirming the legal legitimacy of their implementation. Unanimously, the court’s ministers considered that the equality stated in Article Five of the Brazilian Constitution, which states that all Brazilians are equal before the law, without distinction of any kind, is a formal equality that, to be translated into a concrete reality, requires the adoption of policies capable of correcting historically produced inequalities (Silvério, 2012).

The retailer took a stand. In a text published in Brazil Journal, its CEO, Frederico Trajano, justified the initiative by emphasizing that while black people made up the majority of the company’s workforce, they were still situated at the base of the organizational hierarchy and rarely seen in management or leadership positions, and were non-existent within the Executive Committee or the Board of Directors. He acknowledged that out of the 250 trainees that Magalu had trained in recent years, only ten were black. He highlighted that it was not a philanthropic action, but rather a conviction that diversity would enable the company to generate more return for its shareholders. He concluded by stating that there was no possibility of reversing the position taken (Trajano, 2020).

Is Magalu’s trainee program a racist initiative? Is it an expression of reverse racism? We would like to propose an answer to these questions by bringing the concept of racialization into this discussion. It allows us to defend the following position: racial inclusion programs created by companies cannot be labeled as racist, since, while all racism refers to racialization, not all racialization can be deemed racist simply for using racial terminology.

In Black Orpheus, a preface written for a poetic anthology that marked a milestone in the Blackness Movement (Négritude) that emerged in the 1930s in France, led by African and Caribbean intellectuals studying in the country (Munanga, 2019), the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre (Sartre, 1969) proposed an interpretation of this movement from a dialectical perspective. According to this interpretation, in the process of becoming self-aware and building self-esteem, black people created an anti-racist racism. With this expression, he wanted to state that black people had no desire to subjugate white people and dominate the world. On the contrary, they wanted to abolish racial privileges no matter where they came from.

However, the claim of racial identity would be an important moment of denial of the oppression that had been imposed upon them. An unavoidable but transitory moment, to be overcome by the synthesis formed by the solidarity of the oppressed of all colors, or even by the realization of a race-free society. He emphasized that this anti-racist racism would be the only path that could lead to the abolition of racial differences. According to the philosopher, the black people, initially insulted, would rid themselves of subjection in a process that would involve appropriating the word attributed to them with a pejorative sense, but which is then redefined when they proudly assert themselves as blacks in the face of white people (Sartre, 1969).

We draw attention to the expression ‘anti-racist racism’ used by Sartre. It seems to us to carry elements with the potential for understanding the dynamics of racial relations in the contemporary world. However, it leaves room for confusion. Could any form of racism be positive? Would it not have been more appropriate to construct the play on words using another term? Answering these questions positively, we argue that a possible path for racial studies and anti-racist activism is to resort to the idea of racialization, with a meaning that complements what, from our point of view, has been predominantly attributed to this notion, namely: that related to the mechanisms of racist inferiorization and oppression of the racialized other.

The sociologist Valter Silvério (Silvério, 2023), for example, states that the noun racialization is related to the processes in which ethnic minorities experience fierce discrimination on a hierarchical scale, at the top of which lies whiteness. He also argues that, for Franz Fanon, this process began in Europe and served to deny other cultures. Thus, Silverio (Silvério, 2023, p. 299) points out that, “in the wake of Fanon’s thought, racialization has been conceived based on representations, images, and discourses from the colonial past that are discursively reintroduced in the contemporary racialized present.” Similarly, Brun and Cosquer (2022) claim that Fanon described the principle of racialization as “a dehumanization ..., reducing black people to their difference.” (p. 24).

Nevertheless, in the Dictionary of Ethnic and Racial Relations, sociologist Robert Milles (Milles, 2000) asserts that the term racialization has been used to refer to any process or situation in which the idea of race is introduced to define and qualify a specific population, its characteristics, and its actions. Thus, this word does not necessarily have an obligatory link with the racist perspective. Milles (2000) draws attention to this. “In its narrow use, the ideological content of the process of racialization provides descriptions such as racism or, more specifically, scientific racism,” he points out. However, “in its broader use, also referring to the attribution of meaning ... to phenotypic/genetic variations in all dimensions of social life, the ideological content of the identified process is not necessarily racist,” he adds (pp. 456-458).

Milles (2000) then warns that it becomes necessary to consider the meanings constructed around the idea of race and the role played by populations in this process: whether they are objects or subjects. In an interview given to Pedro Jaime and Ari Lima (2001), Didier Fassin drew attention to the fact that “Franz Fanon and, before him, W. E. B. Du Bois had already pointed out the polysemic nature of racialization and the complexity of the interaction in which the one who is marked (‘Look, a black person!’) recognizes himself (“I am a victim of discrimination as a black person”) (p. 274). In this same line of reasoning, Milles (2000) ponders that those who have historically been victims of racialization may in turn employ the idea of race without this usage having a racist content. Consequently, for him, the concepts of racism and racialization should be treated as analytically distinct.

It is from this analytical distinction that we build our argumentation in this thought piece. We advocate for its relevance, aware that racial studies, and their developments in the field of organizational studies, contain theoretical divergences inscribed in multiple epistemological approaches.

The way we mobilize the notion of racialization here is in line with Milles (2000) warning and specifically refers to the discussion of this term made by D. Fassin (2006, 2010). It is important to note that Didier Fassin is a renowned French anthropologist, sociologist, and physician, globally recognized for his work in the fields of public health, social inequalities, migrations, and especially for his studies on racialization and politics of life and death (biopolitics), from the perspective of a moral anthropology. Currently, he is a professor of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, as well as director of studies at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) in Paris, and professor at the Collège de France, where he holds the permanent chair “Moral Questions and Political Issues in Contemporary Societies” (Diniz, 2016; Jaime & Lima, 2011; Weintraub & Vasconcellos, 2013).

According to D. Fassin (2010), it is often considered that racialization is the expression of individual/intentional or collective/institutional racism; nonetheless, it is not limited to this outline. “Racialization can certainly be racist,” he states. But that is certainly not the case “when it proceeds from the racial identification of a group that recognizes itself as ‘black’ and mobilizes as such to constitute itself ... as a political force or cultural reality,” he adds. Didier Fassin suggests that the refusal of conservative segments to accept the mobilization of the racial category by racialized groups as a legitimate political strategy is what constitutes a problematic issue. This is because, from his point of view, if “racialization is first and foremost the imposition of an explicitly or implicitly racial category on individuals and groups, generally to dominate and exploit them, to exclude and combat them,” this phenomenon is, however, “more complex” and “there exists a dialectical relationship between discrimination and recognition” (D. Fassin, 2010, p. 165).

In this sense, Didier Fassin (D. Fassin, 2006, p. 21) argues that “alongside the classic combination of racial racism, there exists a non-racist racialization, but also a racism without races.” In other words: “There is a racial thinking without racism, and there is a racism without racial support” (D. Fassin, 2006, p. 30). Regarding racial racism, it pertains to the belief and assertion of the existence of biologically constitutive differences among populations, implying hierarchical assumptions. As for racism without races, it results from the fact that the emergence of a kind of moral hygiene in contemporary societies protects them from openly racialist and racist discourses. Notwithstanding, this does not make racism disappear. Racist practices, which previously relied on the idea of race, now anchor themselves in notions such as culture or identity. This semantic shift is present, for example, in the rhetoric of the far-right in France. This rhetoric opposes the presence of Africans or French people of African descent in the country, justifying this position not by claiming a supposed racial inferiority of black people, but by asserting the right to preserve “French cultural identity.” Finally, non-racist racialization allows us to think about the dilemma of institutions that, to fight against racial discrimination, must use the lexicon of race, aiming to implement affirmative actions, at the risk of being accused of practicing reverse racism (D. Fassin, 2006).

We endorse the perspective presented by D. Fassin (2006, 2010), as we believe that by mobilizing the idea of race, Black people articulate a political force. Similarly, institutions built as white spaces, such as companies and universities, when implementing programs or policies with a racial focus, are responding to the demands of groups that have been racialized. With this endorsement, we do not want to suggest that the adoption of such programs or policies by companies automatically results in the disappearance of racism and its effects. Nor do we want to naively reaffirm the very categories that have sustained (and still sustain) racial hierarchies. However, we consider that racialization has the potential to constitute a strategy for struggling, with different levels of gradation, in specific contexts that require a confrontation with racism.

Although the discussion on identity is not the focus of this work, we highlight that Didier Fassin’s argument refers to a warning made by the sociologist Antônio Sérgio Guimarães, in logical continuity with the perspective of the French anthropologist. Guimarães (2005) emphasized that a racist position can be supported by a non-racialist logic, while certain anti-racist strategies are based on the grammar of racialization. He concluded: “if black people consider their race does not exist, they will also end up believing that they do not exist fully as people, since that is how they are, in part, perceived and classified by others.” (p. 67).

Let’s avoid misunderstandings! We emphasize what we have previously pointed out: D. Fassin (2010) acknowledges that racialization originally imposed an explicitly or implicitly racial category on certain groups to exploit and exclude them. However, he considers that in the contemporary world, it pertains to a much more complex phenomenon that is not immediately entangled with racism. It is in this sense that he argues that:

From an analytical point of view, as well as from a moral perspective, racism does not represent a problem, since we know that it stems from an inferiorization or a denial of the racialized other, and we generally agree that it is a practice to be condemned, even in courts. Racialization, on the other hand, is more problematic, both from an analytical perspective (What does it mean? What does it allow us to say?) and a moral one (Is it wrong to use racial language? How should we particularly evaluate this language when it is used by those who are discriminated?) (Jaime & Lima, 2011, p. 274).

For this reason, D. Fassin (2010) opposes those who, like British sociologist (Gilroy, 2007), claim to write against race and for a planetary universalism. The French anthropologist supports his position by pointing out that societies are not at the same point in their histories in terms of the racial question and the awareness that their members have of it. Furthermore, within the same society and in a given period, this history is expressed differently according to the positions occupied by individuals in racialized relations. Groups don’t have the same relationship with the racial question, they don’t have the same interest in mobilizing it. The dominant groups, on the one hand, are more willing to erase their mark within their discourse. The dominated, on the other hand, remember the permanence of their reality within their experience.

In short, for D. Fassin (2010), racialization is an analytical tool not to certify the idea of race, but to account for the disputes around the issue of race that take place in public arenas with multiple meanings and objectives. It is true that this tool is surrounded by the impasse of all thinking and action that uses racial categories to combat racism. This impasse, warns D. Fassin (2010), needs to be faced by those in the progressive political field who reject the idea of race, but fight against racial discrimination by referring to racially defined groups. It is a question of advocating an anti-racism that is structured on the logic of racialization. Conservative thinking and practices, on the other hand, don’t seem to be bound by this paradox. Nevertheless, this is because they either deliberately position themselves as racialists and racists, or, on the contrary, they jointly deny the reality of races and the existence of racism.

Let’s return to the controversy surrounding Magalu’s Trainee Program. It is certainly not a racist initiative, nor an expression of reverse racism. It is a response from the company to the sociopolitical and economic context in which it is immersed. It is an adjusted, albeit limited, response to a portion of the historical claims of black movements in post-abolition Brazil, which have been accumulating since the early 20th century and, for various reasons, have gained greater density and reach in the 21st century, even though they are wrapped in a dynamic of advances and setbacks caused by conservative reactions.

It’s important to highlight that we do not have a parochial view of this initiative by Magalu. This is because, beyond the historical and moral aspects it involves, it is worth noting that the Brazilian Black population constitutes a trillion-dollar market, made up of about 120 million individuals (Instituto Locomotiva, 2022). And thanks to the different expressions of anti-racist activism, the people who make up this market are increasingly aware of their racial identity. Consequently, with the initiative to train Black individuals for managerial positions, the company also aims to be closer to and respond to the demands of this segment of consumers, as its own CEO acknowledged when justifying the decision to implement such a program (Trajano, 2020). Furthermore, the organization also seeks to align with the requirements that have been demanded by investment funds and other stakeholders regarding companies’ attention to environmental, social, and governance issues, referred to as ESG principles. In this sense, companies have been pressured to include diversity criteria in their people management practices, operations, supplier relations, marketing, and communication, etc. (Jaime & Santos-Souza, 2024).

However, let us not be deceived! Initiatives of this nature will only have consistency if they are rooted in organizational policies and strategies, through the engagement of top leadership and the executive and managerial staff of companies. This means, first and foremost, that these leaders must publicly commit to building an anti-racist society, making this evident to the broader society as well as to their professionals by implementing measures aimed at the non-acceptance of racist practices (Jaime & Santos-Souza, 2024). Otherwise, they will represent, as we still see in the cases of many companies, examples of what sociologist (Gilroy, 2007) acerbically defined as corporate multiculturalism and commercial blackness. With these expressions, he meant that the glamour of difference sells well, but it represents an essentialized, petrified, domesticated, and tamed difference, constituting a pseudo-tolerance. The ironic acidity of his critique becomes evident in the following passage:

The successors of Fanon’s leaping native man [an image that refers to the way in which colonialism bestialized black people] are visible everywhere in the imaginary world of corporate multiculture. Their [the black body’s] exceptional physical dexterity lends its magical qualities to the sale of commodities such as cosmetics, athletic shoes, and clothing, all of which promote complex forms of mimicry, intimacy, and perhaps even solidarity across the color line. You will believe that a man can fly (Gilroy, 2007, p. 303).

Escaping this cosmetic racial inclusion requires constant attention from black movements so that companies’ diversity programs go beyond market interests; and then they assume their responsibility in building an anti-racist society (Jaime & Santos-Souza, 2024). It is from this perspective that we support our position in this thought piece: Magalu’s trainee program is not a racist initiative, nor much less an expression of reverse racism. To justify it, we resort to a comparison.

According to a survey carried out by the Ethos Institute in 2016, black people occupied only 6.3 percent of middle management positions and 4.7 percent of top management positions in the 500 largest companies operating in Brazil. Even though at the time this contingent corresponded to 54.9 percent of the Brazilian population. The situation was even worse when the data was broken down to focus specifically on black women. They accounted for 1.6 percent of professionals in middle management positions and 0.4 percent of the elite in top management positions in these companies. In absolute numbers, there were only two black women among the 548 directors, white and non-white, and of both sexes, who worked in the 500 largest companies operating in Brazil (Instituto Ethos, 2016, Jaime & Santos-Souza, 2024).

Yet African Americans make up around 13 percent of the US population and occupy 9.4 percent of management positions in the Fortune 100 companies, according to a report by The Executive Leadership Council (Ferreira, 2013). Therefore, to have a representation of blacks in the corporate world proportionally close to that found in the United States, which is already unequal (72.3% of what would be an equitable representation of the population’s share), we should have 38% of blacks in top management positions in these companies. This percentage is eight times what we have today, 4.7% (Jaime & Santos-Souza, 2024).

The comparison makes clear a reality that contrasts with the idea of Brazil as a racial democracy, in which whites and blacks would live side by side and the shadow of racism would not exist. Data analysis also makes it clear that racial inequality in Brazil is greater than that found in the country which, alongside South Africa, has represented the most standout example of racist society. An inconvenient truth for us Brazilians!

Statistics like these have underpinned the adoption of affirmative action in different countries around the world. It can be no different in Brazil, a country in which racism has been structurally ingrained since its colonial slave origins and has been reproduced with continuity and mutations. We could talk about reverse racism if our historical formation had been different; if it had fallen to black individuals to control the political-military and sociocultural apparatuses that led them to produce an economy based on the unpaid labor of white individuals traded as commodities in the transatlantic slave trade. Moreover, if in addition to all the physical brutality, they had inflicted upon whites, through an ideological system, a symbolic violence equivalent to that of anti-black racism, which sought, with serious psychological impacts, but fortunately without complete success, to instill a sense of intellectual and aesthetic inferiority in the black population.

There is another old argument that goes hand in hand with the accusation of reverse racism in this imbroglio. The claim that there are no races among human beings and that, therefore, programs of this nature are not justified. The fact that the idea of race has no scientific basis has been known since the middle of the 20th century, when Molecular Biology and Population Genetics dismantled the foundations of Raciology, the pseudo-science of races (Munanga, 2004). Nonetheless, the discoveries of science don’t necessarily and immediately change the social imaginary. “No, race doesn’t exist. Yes, race exists. It is certainly not what they say it is, but it is nevertheless the most tangible, real, brutal of realities,” said French sociologist (Guillaumin, 1986).

As we have already pointed out in this thought piece, in the contemporary world, racist discourses and practices are not based solely, or even preferably, on the assumption of the existence of races. Nonetheless, as anthropologist Kabengele Munanga (Munanga, 2004) has stated, yesterday’s races are today’s ethnicities and cultures. It is for this reason that Didier Fassin (D. Fassin, 2006) maintains that alongside the classic combination of racial racism, there is a racism without races, but also a non-racist racialization.

The concept of racialization presented here allows us to ask the following question: is racism present every time the idea of race is mobilized? It unfolds in the paradox presented by sociologist Eric Fassin (E. Fassin, 2006) in the aforementioned quote: is it appropriate to combat racism by using the idea of race? Answering these questions is no simple task. It requires complex thinking. However, as we have tried to argue in this thought piece, even if all racism is a form of racialization, since it uses racial vocabulary, not all racialization can be called racist merely because it uses this lexicon.

Magazine Luiza wasn’t the only company to create a trainee program aimed at young black people. On the same day it was made known, the chemical company Bayer announced the launch of a very similar initiative. Both organizations reissued these initiatives in 2022. This is a movement that dates back to the early 2000s, when the main banks operating in Brazil, due to a complex political playing field, began this process of racial inclusion (P. Jaime, 2017, 2022). Since then, this practice has spread to other economic segments, such as advertising and large law firms. Among other factors, this has been due to anti-racist activism and the Terms of Conduct Adjustment that have been agreed between companies and the Labor Prosecutor’s Office. Managers and business leaders can no longer ignore this agenda. It doesn’t have the scope of public policies to promote racial equity, but it is an assistance.

Notwithstanding, even considering this progress, we do not subscribe to the view that these measures are sufficient, since there is a long way to go. We cannot wait such a long time to achieve significant transformations in the job market and in companies. We have been fighting for this for 136 years, since the end of the colonial slave system and, even so, racial inequalities and the reproduction of racist practices in education and employment still block the rise of black professionals. In this way, even allowing us to imagine new times, more prosperous and fairer, the advances we see should make us alert and keep us moving forward. In our case in particular, a piece of research is underway to analyze the controversies that erupted in the Brazilian public debate when Magalu launched the trainee program that we have addressed here. We are mapping, through media publications, these controversies and the arguments that different actors gave to justify their positions in favor or against the program.

We end this thought piece with a compliment to theoretical-epistemological plurality. We are aware that the analytical path we follow here is not the only one possible, nor do we want to suggest that it is the best, for understanding the phenomenon of racism and anti-racism in organizations. It is inspired by philosophical pragmatism (Cometti, 2010; James, 2022) and the pragmatist turn that has marked French social sciences since the late 1970s and early 1980s (Dosse, 2013). It also reflects the unfolding of this movement in organizational studies in Brazil. Therefore, a critical approach is intended, aimed at social transformation, the radicalization of democracy, and justice (Serva, 2023).

Although Didier Fassin does not claim to be a pragmatist author (Jaime & Lima, 2011), when proposing the concept of racialization as an analytical tool to account for what is at stake when the idea of race is mobilized, he is anchored in the pragmatist principle according to which ideas are not valid in themselves, but because of the uses made of them and the effects of these uses.

It is from this pragmatist perspective that Eric Fassin (E. Fassin, 2006, p. 106) asks: “if you voluntarily blind yourself to race, isn’t that also condemning yourself to remain blind to racism?” He argues that ideas should not be grasped independently of the historical situations in which they are heard, but, on the contrary, depending on the social contexts in which they are mobilized. In other words, they cannot be taken as an expression of abstract theoretical positions, but as the formulation of political strategies, which gain their full meaning not according to internal logic, but according to the historical circumstances in which they are inscribed. Thus, he questions: “Is it racist to talk about ‘races’?” And he answers: “It depends.” He continues by interrogating, “And not talking?” to reply in the same way: “It all depends.” This is because “in different political situations, the same position takes on potentially opposite meanings” (E. Fassin, 2006, pp. 118-119).

Other epistemological approaches are certainly suitable for the analysis of racial dynamics in companies: from positivism and its operationalization in pieces of research aimed at measuring racial discrimination, to decolonial and black feminist approaches, with their reconstructions/deconstructions of the genealogy of the idea of race, its overlaps with the origins of colonialism and capitalism and its updates in the present. Be that as it may, we believe that the theoretical-epistemological approach that underpins the provocation that we have launched in this thought piece on the debate on the racial issue has its merits. It escapes essentialist, Manichaean, determinist or nihilist views of social problems; and leads us to think of the idea of race as something continually produced, disputed, negotiated, and given new meanings in historical-social contexts crossed by power relations. Regarding the consequences of this approach in the field of organizational studies, we consider that the type of analysis it entails allows the understanding of the dynamics of racialization in contemporary organizations not only as a reflection of racial inequalities or structural racism. It suggests that these dynamics can also be understood as expressions of actions carried out by representatives of groups that were racialized as objects to become subjects - actions undertaken through individual strategies or collective mobilization (Jaime & Santos-Souza, 2024).