The Business of Racism: Labor and Environment in Brazil's Racial Capitalism

In The Business of Racism, Ian Carrillo employs a case study from Brazil’s sugarcane industry to show how racial capitalism is promulgated and maintained through politics and business. As Carrillo recounts, in the mid-2000s, Brazil embarked on a state-led project to improve environmental and labor conditions in sugarcane production. He describes how, seeing increased government regulation of their worksite as a threat to their power, the elites of Brazil’s sugar-ethanol industry repurposed long-standing racial ideologies to undermine progressive institutions and elevate their own leaders. Carrillo’s extensive ethnographic fieldwork in mills and plantations, as well as interviews with federal labor regulators and sugar-ethanol industry elites in Brazil, weaves together an account of how Brazil’s labor and environmental regulations are forged through racial and class struggles at worksites and within the state. The Business of Racism contributes to ongoing sociological debates about race, development, and the environment while highlighting future pathways for achieving racial justice, labor equality, and climate sustainability.

Ian Carrillo is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Oklahoma.