Race relations and organizational studies in Brazil

This theoretical essay discusses the issue of race relations in Brazil and explores its interfaces with studies on diversity management in organizations. Therefore, it seeks to problematize this field's appropriation of American studies, pushing to the background - or even ignoring - studies on race relations developed in Brazilian anthropology and sociology. This questioning helps us realize that organizational studies in Brazil have been displaced in this debate, either by the assumption that our diversity management should follow Anglo-Saxon parameters, or by the distance that the area has maintained from Brazilian studies that address racial minorities and their dynamic relations. The final part of the paper retrieves two important works produced under Brazilian studies on race relations and, from them, examines this debate's contributions to the study of Brazilian organizations. The paper concludes by drawing researchers' attention to the need to rescue the Brazilian debate as a way of contextualizing diversity management in Brazil.