Portuguese colonization was a racist system and produced a highly racialized society. The founding texts of the colonial system are based on the notion of race. But black colour was never officially mentioned for direct discriminatory purposes against individuals: it was mentioned to designate the whole of a people - the 'vagrant people' - which in turn would have the greatest consequences for individuals. It is what I have called 'social racism', a racism that defined Otherness not only by the skin colour of individuals, but as much by the definition of the non-capitalist sphere of social life of a whole people, even if petty whites and natives could live side by side in some neighbourhoods. The origin of this situation is not directly to be found in late slavery, neither in a "smooth transition" between slavery and forced labour, but in the rupture between slavery -which was not in plantation complex but for slave trade to the Amezricas or Indian Ocean- which aoccured when great and foreign companies introduced massive forced labour. In certain ways, social racism transformed native people into something closer to a caste than a race; a kind of 'professional strata'. In that way, in its social consequences, indigenato was far more important than blackness. It was indigenato more than blackness that prohibited the social formation of a black elite, expressing the 'proximity racism' of petty whites in Portuguese colonialism, different from the 'distant racism' of other more capitalized forms of colonialism.