The Colour of Inequality in South Africa and Brazil: Making Sense of Social Policy as Reparations

A radical reinterpretation of the historically oppressed “black racialized underclass” in South Africa and Brazil. The book explores how South Africa’s and Brazil’s social policy architectures have been shaped by transhistorical trajectories of hierarchical citizenships. Phiri provides two interventions to scholarship, one on “the epistemic question” and the second on “the social question”, by offering a critique of a racialized neoliberal global political economy that permeates the two countries’ social policies. In doing so, he addresses several important questions. First, can social policy resolve the residuals and contradictions of transhistorical inequalities that have become systemic features of these aspirant democracies that aim to forge a new social contract under hierarchical racialized neoliberal capitalism? Second, given the fact that both South Africa’s and Brazil’s socio-political formations are enmeshed in histories of imperial violence, and a hierarchical racialized global political economy carved through Trans-Atlantic slavery, what paradigmatic and theoretical tools can be deployed to think about social policy as reparations? Third, which institutions will create conducive conditions for the flourishing and political aesthetics for those racialized as black? Phiri concludes by defining “social policy as reparations” through a process of “worldmaking”.

• Publication date: 24 November 2026
• Page count: 201
• Dimensions: Height 228 mm; Width 152 mm
• Publisher: Haymarket Books
• Format: Paperback
• ISBN-13: 9798888909065