Research on the electoral penalty of minority candidates is typically explained with ethnic voting. This article shows that minority candidates might get lower vote shares than majority candidates not because voters discriminate against them, but because they suffer from ethnic inequality. Ethnic inequality plays out at second order elections and transfers to first order election by the advantage professional politicians have over other candidates. In order to test our argument we analyze minority candidates' vote shares at the Brazilian 2014 parliamentary and 2016 municipal elections. We make use of a dataset including all candidates for each election, which is merged with census and election data at the municipality level. We apply fixed effects models in order to control for variance at the level of the candidates, states, and municipalities respectively. The article contributes to the literature by providing a new explanation of the relationship between ethnic inequality and the underrepresentation of ethnic minorities. Its main implication is that adequate representation of ethnic minorities is unlikely to be achieved without reducing ethnic inequality.