Driven by the questions that the contemporary political debate around Identity Politics - or identitarian politics, as it has been conventionally called - raises about the relationship between race and class, the present research proposes itself to investigate the role of race in capitalist modernity. Considering the movement to historicize race in its modern sense as one of central importance to this task, this work engages in a historical reconstruction that emphasizes the role of transatlantic slavery for the capitalist genesis, elucidating its colonial aspect. Alongside the effort to historicize race and to understand capitalism from the events that took place in the Atlantic it is proposed a reflection on the effects of the modern racial signifier through theoretical perspectives that question the limits and ambiguities of race in modernity. Through these considerations that seek to contribute to the critical thinking about the place of race in capitalism the aim of this research is to address the different ways in which the relationship between race and class is understood and mobilized in the political debate around identity struggles – with its positions that range from a neglect of the indissociability between the identities produced by the modern racial sign and the way capitalism functions, on the one side; to a reduction of race to a question of a purely economic order, on the other.