The importance of the information race/color (color category) in evincing racial inequalities in health and in policy-making is the topic of this article.We start with the assumption that race/color, social class, gender and generation and structuring forces in our society which interfere in health, disease and death outcomes 1 and that one strategy for facing these inequities is to advance equity-promoting policies within a systemic, universal policy.In the 1970s and 1980s, the academic production, by establishing the relationship between social rights, citizenship and health, was anchored in the pillars of the social class concept in order to evince the relationship between population and health, morbimortality and its class, socioeconomic and cultural differences, established in time, space, individuals and populations 2,3 .In the 1990s, reflections on the demography of inequalities emerged as a new object of study in the public health field. With this, categories of gender, homosexuality, heterosexuality, identities and health 4 , as well as the social construction of risk associated with socially constructed power relations and hierarchies 5 , also became a focus of investigation. But, if we are discussing socially-determined power relations and hierarchies, how were inequalities within inequalities configured? Were there differences in health outcomes among women from different social classes and races? What relation is there between gender, class, race/color and health?To Saffioti 6 (p. 9), these elements make up a tight knot, an image used to simultaneously show "...
the symbiosis between racism, sexism and social classes, and also leave open the possibility of tugging on one or another of the strands that compose it in order to carry out a more than accurate scrutiny".In the 1990s, leaders from the black movement, based on the theoretical assumptions of public health and on the indicators which show gender and race/color inequalities, began to question the relationship between racism and health, urging the public health administration to include the race/ color category in the health information systems.This inclusion first took place in São Paulo City (Ordinance n. 696/90 7 ). In 1996, the color category was included in the Brazilian Ministry of Health's Mortality Information and Live-Births Information Systems (Ordinance n. 3,947/98 8 ). The history of this implementation is described in Adorno et al. 9 .The presence of the information on race/color, color category, in the mortality and live-births information systems made it possible to study differences in mortality and morbidity according to sex, age and race/color 10,11,12,13 . The resulting epidemiological data evince racial inequalities in the PERSPECTIVAS PERSPECTIVES