ABSTRACT
This article analyzes the different ways in which social inequality is argued and justified in the young business sector of Lima’s upper classes, with the objective of making visible the logic of their discourses and the ensemble of representations appearing therein. Starting from a racial discourse that rejects, erases, and displaces race to other categories, young people construct three arguments aimed at legitimizing social inequality: the educational argument, in which the speaker’s culture is positioned protectively as the only one that should circulate in the social space; the racial argument, which hierarchizes the population and is camouflaged under supposedly educative considerations; and, finally, the economic argument, which assumes the inevitable accumulation of a sector under the functioning of the market economy. Based on a fairly uniform discourse, these young people appeal to a “lack of education” in order to legitimize existent inequality and to construct an ideological discourse that never questions the economic system.
