This thesis seeks to understand how different notions of social justice, in particular those based on meritocratic parameters, are understood and disputed in Brazil. The main concepts worked on were based on different political or ideological grammars, such as: i) libertarian principles, present in Nozick s theory; and ii) welfarist principles, present in Rawlsian theory. The study of the disputes surrounding the implementation of Affirmative Action (AA) policies in Brazilian higher education in the early 2000s, demonstrated that the conceptions of social justice proposed until then were able to explain the main Brazilian debates. The gravitational center of disagreements with the AA in this period was limited to efforts to delegitimize racial based quotas. Despite the success of these programs proven by countless researches in the last decade, like the work that GEMAA/IESPUERJ has carried out, we see today, 20 years after the institutionalization of AA in Brazil, there are still no major agreements on the pertinence of policies based exclusively on racial criteria. Finally, the thesis sought to understand this last issue – the insistence of denying the recognition of Brazilian structural racism – carrying out the exploratory analysis of an event – the controversy that arose around the implementation of an exclusive trainee program for black people by the company Magazine Luiza in 2020 –, with the aim of testing the hypothesis that the delegitimization of AA with an exclusively racial basis has been a debate dominated or influenced contemporaneously by arguments and actors linked to the extreme right, which we managed to prove only provisionally, giving rise to the realization of future investigations.