Desigualdades sociais foram tradicionalmente investigadas no âmbito do Estado-nação, privilegiando-se as diferenças de classe e a perspectiva sincrônica. Isto é: ainda que a investigação especializada, sobretudo na América Latina, venha se dedicando já há algumas décadas a estudar os nexos entre classe e outras formas de classificação social (raça, gênero etc.), só muito recentemente registram-se avanços substantivos na investigação sobre os processos históricos e os nexos globais que configuram as desigualdades observadas num país determinado. O presente artigo, em sua primeira parte, oferece um panorama desses avanços, traçando um marco analítico para o estudo de desigualdades sociais a partir de interdependências históricas, geográficas e relativas às diferentes formas de classificação social. A segunda parte aplica as referências analíticas desenvolvidas ao estudo das desigualdades que afetam a população afrodescendente na América Latina.

Social inequalities have conventionally been investigated as synchronous processes occurring within the contours of national borders and connected to the concept of class. As a consequence established scholarship, especially in Latin America, has given little attention to the historical dimensions and global entanglements between class and other social classifications that have shaped existing inequalities. A number of recent contributions have attempted to correct these analytical shortfalls from a variety of perspectives. In order to overcome methodological nationalism, a first group of contributions has focused on the interconnections between national and global structures of inequality, showing how inequalities correspond to entanglements between social processes at different geographical levels: local, national, global. A second group of contributions has investigated the relationship between different axes of stratification, focusing on how social inequalities emerge at the intersections between different social ascriptions, particularly those of race, class, gender and ethnicity. This paper presents a brief survey of the debates in both fields as well as a set of resources for overcoming the current deficits in the research on interdependent inequalities. In order to illustrate how some of these resources operate analytically, the second half of the paper discusses the case of social inequalities affecting Afro-descendants in Latin America.