This study aims at contributing to the understanding of black women s political activism. It focuses on students that benefitted from affirmative action programs at UERJ. My analysis posits that racist and sexist capitalism veils and naturalizes racial and gender violence, renders invisible black women s historical forms of resistance, but does not annihilate their resistance. Stereotypes and negative representations of black women are both absorbed and negated by black women. Black women s struggles throughout Brazilian history have confronted domination patterns, thus creating, following Castells, the conditions for the deconstruction of legitimizing identities as well as the affirmation of project identities. This work wants to understand the meanings, limits and possibilities of the collective construction of identities based on race and gender. It analyzes the trajectories of five undergraduate female students who entered the university through the racial quota system, beginning in 2003, under the following criteria: a) that they are, or have been, students at Uerj; b) that they self-define as black woman; c) and that they participate(d) in a Black Movement or Black woman organization during their undergraduate years. The questions structuring field work were: a) how does racism impact the process of the militant black women s identity construction at Uerj? b) what aspects of their lives were considered relevant when confronting racism at the university? Racism is an important ideology of domination in capitalism: this is the hypothesis of the research. Capitalism aims at annihilating the African-based cultural roots that are necessary for the construction of a racial identity, and upon which a black identity is built. The research utilized a series of methodological and theoretical approaches, namely: a) based on available sources, the analysis of gender and racial inequalities, as well as the construction of new indicators derived from Uerj data bases; b) interviews and photographs; and c) bibliographic review on affirmative action, racism, and black women. The work finds that the interviewee s experiences are permeated by racial violence. However, what distinguishes them from other black women is their choice of politics as a way to approach power relations that structure class, race, and gender in society.