Through signs, performances and corporalities

the raciality in tones of passers-by in the pão de mel supermarket

Abstract

If the supermarkets are presented as an invention of modernity and arise, firstly, in the most economically powerful countries, to later expand globally (the first Brazilian supermarket appeared in Rio de Janeiro), as well as the premise of modern times, where there are dominant and dominated, in its evolution, there was also its stratification to meet different publics, having as criteria the economic power. The present study had the scope of undertaking ethnography in two supermarkets, of a network considered to be of high economic standard, located in the two neighborhoods with the most expensive square meters of the city of Teresina - Piauí, for 14 (fourteen) consecutive days, at different times and, through observation of the sociability of the place, identify what were the "colors" and "profiles" of those who consumed compared to those who composed the local workforce. Aware that raciality, born from the European colonizing project where non-white people were defined as inferior, by criteria of domination and exploitation, still persists in the world due to the reflexes of coloniality, the present study aimed to establish a dialogue between race and class based on what was observed in the field, in conjunction with the theoretical framework of counter-colonial authors such as Dussel, Quijano, and Mbembe. As a result, considering that supermarkets are spaces where power is exercised by including and excluding individuals, and that in our country, raciality is a byproduct of maintaining social inequalities, since white people still hold most of the "wealth" and power in society, it was found that, on every day, it was mostly components of whiteness that acted in the role of consumers and black and brown people who made up the team of workers in the Pão de Mel.