This article highlights the discursive contradictions present in state social interventions linked to social action when referring to socially vulnerable and/or impoverished Black and indigenous people. Firstly, it will analyze the discourses of those intervening about the proposals for the implementation of mechanisms of preferential access or of ethnoracial exclusivity of beneficiaries in programs to combat poverty. Secondly, it will explore their epistemic resistance to the incorporation of 'racial group' or 'skin color' as selection criteria. In doing so, the article aims to propose that institutions of social well–being need to transform and that social services should adapt to the demands of cultural diversity, adopting both new professional practices and renewed structures of meaning that facilitate the transition to nation as imagined in the Constitution.