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This chapter examines the experiences and responses of Black Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro to stigmatization and discrimination. It first provides background information to place the interviewees in their historical and socioeconomic context, taking into account race relations in Brazil as well as the legacy of slavery, the rise and fall of racial democracy, and racial inequality and segregation in the country. It then considers the ethnoracial groupness of Black Brazilians in Rio de Janeiro, with a focus on self-identification and group boundaries, before discussing the ways in which the group struggles with what they perceive as a subtle or masked racism and how they experience specific incidents of stigmatization and discrimination. The chapter also analyzes how Black Brazilians respond to ethnoracial exclusion and what they view as the best responses from a normative perspective. Finally, it explains how the patterns of those experiences and responses can be accounted for.

This book has examined the nature of stigmatization and discrimination by documenting the experiences and responses of ordinary people who belong to variously stigmatized ethnoracial groups. It has explored how African Americans, Black Brazilians, Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews make sense of their predicaments and mold their situations, thus shedding light on the ways in which specific groups experience ethnoracial exclusion and respond to it. This concluding chapter reviews some of the book's major themes and the analytical gains achieved by the study in terms of accounting for the micro-experiences of ethnoracial exclusion and responses to those experiences through a macro comparison of three distinct national contexts; groupness and group boundaries; cultural membership, redistribution, and recognition; and understanding racial formations, reproductions, and transformations in Brazil, Israel, and the United States. The challenges that lie ahead as well as new venues of research are also discussed.

This chapter describes the multidimensional framework used to explain the quotidian experiences and responses of ordinary people to ethnoracial exclusion. The framework analytically distinguishes between three dimensions to make sense of how they influence the ways in which each ethnoracial group (from Brazil, Israel, and the United States) experiences ethnoracial exclusion. These dimensions pertain to history and the socioeconomic and institutional context; the strength and mode of groupness; and available cultural repertoires. The chapter considers how various explanatory dimensions are articulated differently in each case, arguing that a combination of elements interact with cultural repertoires and groupness to enable various types of excluding experiences and responses to those experiences across contexts. It also relates these themes to several approaches in the literature, including social psychology and the comparative literature on race and ethnicity.