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.