Preto no branco: a Justiça Tributária tem cor? Uma análise crítica da iniquidade racial da tributação brasileira

Abstract

A symbolic one hundred years after the abolition of slavery, the 1988 Constitution formalizes a Democratic State of plural Law, which prohibits racial discrimination, aims to eradicate poverty, marginalization, reduce inequalities and criminalizes racism. In its body, principles and rules related to freedom, security, justice and solidarity, aimed at substantive racial democracy. In black bodies, the historical reflections of the denial of full citizenship, materialized in rates of poverty, violence and lack of access to conditions for dignified human development. With the second largest black population in the world, decades after the promulgation of the Maximum Charter, Brazil still faces the growing concentration of wealth and inequalities in opportunities linked to skin color. Poor and black continue as if they were synonymous. At this juncture, this research promotes the urgent debate about the racial inequity of Brazilian taxation. It uses Critical Race Theory and the interpretation of legal norms by Black Hermeneutics as theoretical frameworks, which analyze the concrete effects of norms on the black population, reveal indirect discrimination and recognize race as a constitutional postulate of positive discrimination. It thus inserts the National Tax System, as an affirmative action policy, in the challenge of freeing black people from the shackles of the base of the social pyramid. It seeks propositions that allow the transformation of the reality of race through the fair distribution of the tax burden and the redistributive function of taxes. The obstacles: mitigating fiscal regressivity and overcoming the historical exclusion of black people from fiscal citizenship. In developing the research, it appears that the value filtering of the 1988 Constitution has not yet changed the scenario of indirect racial discrimination, caused by the preponderance of taxation on consumption and the insufficient progressiveness of taxation on income and assets. As consumers, black people bear the financial burden of taxes on goods and services necessary – and possible – to support their families. As citizens, they are excluded from the legal-tax relationship and the consideration of contributory capacity as a measure of equality. From the indirect tax matrix, without disregarding economic efficiency and erosion of tax bases in post-modernity, the “if” and “how” of Brazilian taxation contributes to aggravating, or at least not alleviating, racial inequalities in Brazil. country. It uses the decomposition of income within the Gini index formula, as an economic parameter of inequalities, to conclude that the preponderance of a regressive tax matrix impacts on the denial of black people's access to material goods, effective democratic participation and recognition of social status. In addition to the legislative choice of passive tax liability, indirect taxation removes constitutional guarantees and becomes an instrument of social immobility, which affects black people more seriously. As a prognosis, the new principles of Tax Justice, Reduction of Regressivity and the forecast of cashback on consumption taxation, brought by the Tax Reform of Constitutional Amendment No. 132/2023, denote democratic advancement and have the potential to finally remove the incidence tax the proven title of one of the modulators of Brazilian structural racism.