This paper contributes to the literature on racial discrimination in Brazil. Analogously to Soares (2000), we make use of the Oaxaca-Blinder decomposition, applied to the whole distribution of wages in the 1996 PNAD, to measure the discrimination component of wage differentials between blacks and whites, controlling for persistent educational inequalities. We also provide a comparative profile of racial discrimination in the Northeast and the Southeast, recognizing the important differences across regions in Brazil, both in terms of economic variables and of racial composition of the population. Our results confirm the ''elitist'' nature of Brazilian racial discrimination that was identified by Soares, but reveal that part of the component of wage differentials ordinarily attributed to labor market discrimination is actually explained by persistent educational inequalities between races. The regional profile suggests that the labor market is a more important locus of the racial issue in the Southeast than in the Northeast, although the elitist feature is present in both regions.
