Race, Gender, and Social Class Discrimination in Intersection with Political Identification in Rio de Janeiro ()
ABSTRACT
This article discusses the prejudices and discrimination
against afro-descendants, women, LGBTQ persons, the homeless, immigrants, and
young adults, considering class, religion, and political differences within the
population of the city of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. These types of discrimination
are analyzed through the intersectionality approach using a concept named “discrimination
relational matrix of analysis”. In a
two-phase design of a representative sample 759 urban inhabitants answered a
questionnaire asking for their perceptions, attitudes, practices, and
intergroup relationships on racism, patriarchalism, sexism, homophobia,
xenophobia, and self-identification within different social classes, religions,
and political-ideological identifications; correlations and a statistical model
of Principal Component Analysis was applied to explore the main factors of
discrimination. Analysis results show how
explicit and several kinds of masked discrimination are connected, spread, normalized and popularized through
apparently liberal and democratic speeches, and ambiguous attitudes and
practices according to different interests between
ingroups and outgroups in an environment of competition for resources and historic cultural settings of conservatism,
patriarchalism and social classes prejudices, attached mainly to poverty
and low educational levels. They also highlight a recent global context impacted by the increase in
hate speech and extremism of right-wing political activism of small groups. The
main discriminatory discourses and practices in Rio de Janeiro are openly
uncivilized, sexist, racist, and xenophobic, and discriminate against the lower
social classes and other vulnerable groups via a multidirectional anti-equality
and anti-democratic mainstream, and its radicalization is popularized by a core
leader far right group and is disseminated to and appropriated by distinct
groups based on resources competition.