Aporophobia

It's easy calling somebody a racist (and I'm not talking about skinheads or assholes shouting racist things at matches), but the problem I think it's more aporophobia (sp?) than xenophobia.

In Latin America, the most dramatic results of discrimination have an element of aporophobia, that is, revulsion and hatred for the poor.

We would like to introduce a term coined by Adela Cortina which arose recently and that is affiliated to that of exclusion: It is aporophobia (Cortina, 1997). Feeling of refusal is towards poor people, towards those who do not have a way out of their situation. It breeds on the prejudice that poor people are to blame for their own misery. This feeling subdues many behaviours that are essentially racist, xenophobic and it makes difficult not only integration, but also some politics involving realistic aid to immigrants (Martínez, 2002, pp. 17-23). As pointed out by Cortina (1997), “we don’t marginalize the immigrant because he is rich, nor the black if he is a basketball player, nor the retired with patrimony, we marginalize poor people” (p. 70).

Introducing aporophobia in the catalog of hate crimes is a debate that is still open.

It is necessary to confront together the populist discourses of intolerance, xenophobia, and aporophobia, which is hatred of the poor.