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This study examines Brazilian racism in relation to the traumatic legacy of slavery, focusing on denial and disavowal as distinct psychic mechanisms. Using psychoanalytic concepts, we analyze these unconscious defenses and their role in shaping subjectivity within Brazil’s colonial and slavery-induced trauma.Q The displacement of Verleugnung from perversion allows an exploration of societal logic based on racial democracy and whitening, both rooted in colonial and slavery histories. These mechanisms reconstruct traumatic reality, replacing it with another logic. Whitening and the myth of racial democracy sustain the illusion of racism’s nonexistence, acknowledging it while simultaneously denying its presence.