Marcados pela cor: a percepção da discriminação no cotidiano de adultos

Abstract

The concept of race has been widely used to justify hierarchies, inequalities, and marginalization. Growing evidence suggests that Black people experience more discrimination attributed to race/color compared to white people. Currently, there are scales designed to assess the perception of these processes. However, there is still no consensus on which scale can capture, in depth and magnitude, the discriminatory experiences that people with darker skin suffer in society. It is also known that black people have lower levels of education, and that this can influence how these experiences are perceived. Furthermore, there is still a denialism that reaffirms that there is no racial discrimination in Brazil. Given the above, this study aims to verify the association between race/color and experiences of discrimination, regardless of education level, in adult users of Primary Health Care. This is a cross-sectional study with 603 participants from Basic Health Units in Fortaleza (CE) and Belo Horizonte (MG). The response variables were 10 experiences of discrimination in daily life; the explanatory variable considered race/color (white, pardo, and black); and possible confounding and mediating variables were age, sex, and education level. Prevalence ratios (PR) and their respective 95% confidence intervals (95% CI) were estimated using Poisson regression with robust variance, with a significance level of 5%. After full adjustment for sex, age, and education level, pardo (PR = 1.94; 95% CI = 1.07 - 3.51) and black (PR = 4.23; 95% CI = 2.31 - 7.71) individuals showed higher prevalences of being watched in places like stores compared to white individuals. Black individuals also showed higher prevalences of experiences in which people act as if they were not intelligent (PR = 1.71; 95% CI = 1.23 - 2.38) and were dishonest (PR = 2.33; 95% CI = 1.09 - 4.95). The findings of this study demonstrate that racial discrimination is not an abstract or episodic phenomenon, but manifests itself concretely through the perpetuation of stereotypes related to the black and pardo population. It is concluded that the perceived experiences of discrimination associated with pardo and black individuals were precisely those most related to discriminatory processes due to skin color, especially among self-declared black individuals. And that these mechanisms were direct and independent of schooling. However, the study population, being users of the Unified Health System (SUS) and consequently of lower socioeconomic status, may not have captured the more subtle mechanisms of discrimination present in the racist structural system.