Color of Law: Juridical Discourse about Colored People during Brazilian Republican Government

This article aims to investigate three laws created during Brazilian republic government that are relation with colored population: Articles III and VIII of Criminal Code from 1890; law o quotas from 1934; and the statute of racial equality, from 2010. The theoretical referential will be critical discourse analysis (CDA) and it will rely on the work of Van Dijk (2012) and Fairclough (2001). The purpose of this paper will be problematize the myth of racial democracy through the study of intertextuality between juridical and scientific discourse and to defend the hypothesis that the myth is both a way to restrain ethnic conflicts and also a mechanism of domination, but it is not a representation of Brazilian reality.