What Color Should I Go as to the Shopping Mall that You Invited Me to?

Abstract

This article analyzes how discourses on user profiles of shopping malls in the city of Belo Horizonte evidence two aspects of Brazilian socio-historical context: race relations and spatial segregation in organizational contexts. We discuss race relations in Brazil considering color as a discursive construction and shopping malls as organizations that can be configured as spaces of spatial segregation that constitute symbolically private spaces for certain social groups. We used French-style discourse analysis as a methodological strategy. The body of analysis was constituted by discourses present in the Facebook social network and refers to an image that was published by a news outlet about the city of Belo Horizonte that profiled the city's shopping mall clientele in a series of six photos. The research results evidence the discursive construction of color as a dimension of meaning of social practices and representations of individuals that symbolically demarcate who can circulate, and where, in determined organizational spaces, especially in shopping malls.

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