Israel

This chapter examines the experiences and responses of Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews in Israel to stigmatization and discrimination. It first explains the historical and socioeconomic context for the three groups, taking into account the legacy of Zionism that shapes their experiences, the status of Arab Palestinians in the Jewish polity, and questions of ethno-national identity, exclusion, and inclusion affecting Mizrahim and Ethiopians in Israel. It then provides an overview of the Tel Aviv–Jaffa metropolitan area, the research site, before discussing the role of national belonging, race, and ethnicity in the formation of groupness among the respondents, with emphasis on self-identification and group boundaries. It also analyzes the groups' experiences of stigmatization and discrimination, and especially assault on worth, before concluding with an assessment of their reactions to such incidents as well as their views about the best ways to deal with social exclusion.

Accounting for Differences

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.

Conclusion

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.

Brazil

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.

Introduction

This book explores the stigmatizing or discriminatory experiences of ordinary people and how they respond to such experiences, along with the factors that affected their courses of action. Drawing on more than 400 in-depth interviews with African Americans in New York suburbs, Black Brazilians in and around Rio de Janeiro, and Arab Palestinians, Ethiopian Jews, and Mizrahi Jews in Israel, the book investigates how national configurations of cultural repertoires and group boundaries influence experiences of and responses to stigmatization and discrimination. To this end, the book describes the incidents where respondents—middle- and working-class men and women—were treated unfairly and the interactions where they felt underestimated, overscrutinized, misunderstood, feared, overlooked, shunned, or discriminated against. This introduction explains the book's approach for analyzing how groupness is organized around race, ethnicity, phenotype, nationality, or religion, as well as the challenges and questions it addresses, and how the study was undertaken.

The United States

This chapter examines how African Americans residing in New York experience specific incidents of stigmatization and discrimination. It first provides an overview of the background conditions and the place of African Americans in U.S. society in general and in the New York metropolitan area in particular, citing the latter's history of racial tension and deindustrialization. It then presents a complex portrait of African American ethnoracial groupness, with a focus on self-identification and group boundaries, before analyzing how African Americans responded when asked a series of questions about their experiences of stigmatization and discrimination, from what they call assault on worth to racism (blatant or subtle), poor service, and double standards. The chapter also considers how the respondents understand discrimination and describes variations in their experiences by class, age, and gender. Finally, it explores the group's responses (ideal and actual) to stigmatization and discrimination.