Quote:Probably the most famous Brazil American is Gisele Bündchen, erstwhile supermodel and ex-wife of Tom Brady. Bündchen is a German Brazilian, and all the media I see say she is purely German. She grew up in a predominantly German town in the southern state of Rio Grande do Sul, which is often contrasted with the black-dominated areas of northeastern Brazil. About 80% of people in Rio Grande do Sul identify as white, about 10% mixed-race, 5% black and the remaining 5% indigenous, Asian, etc.

These sorts of facts are often used to recapitulate American racial dynamics in Brazil, except here you have a black majority and a white minority, though the latter are still socially, culturally and economically dominant. This is in contrast to the model that Brazilians themselves promoted in the 20th century of being a multiracial and mixed-race society, albeit defined by a fair amount of naked anti-black bias.

The main problem with the first narrative is it is just a plain fact that most Brazilians are mixed-race in the American context. Bündchen is the exception, not the rule. This has been hard to ascertain because of the lack of high density SNP array surveys in the early years of this blog, but I decided to go back and check now that these chips are very cheap, and a paper with 6,500 Brazilians typed on 370,000 SNPs exists to illustrate the ancestry distributions within: A minimum set of ancestry informative markers for determining admixture proportions in a mixed American population: the Brazilian set.


The admixture plot shows that under “11,” sampled in the far southern Brazilian city of Pelotas, only a few individuals on the right portion of the distribution show trace amounts of non-European ancestry. The prevalence of low but widespread Amerindian ancestry is not surprising in Brazil, where the early European settlers seem to have absorbed the natives. Second, under “12” you see samples from the city of Salvador, where 80% of people identify as mixed-race or black. Here you see lots of African ancestry, but only the individuals at the far left of the distribution are as African as the average African American (the rightmost panel is from a central Brazilian city).

This pattern is even more clear on PCA:


What’s the takeway? By American standards most Brazilians are black, because they have African ancestry. This includes a majority of self-identified “white” Brazilians.

A Wrote:I think it’s a known fact that many self-described “Whites” in Latin America are actually mixed-race, with Native-American and/or African ancestry. The exceptions would be Whites descended from more recent immigrants, like Gisele Bundchen.

I’ll give you two examples of my acquaintance, actually two ex-boyfriends. One, who was born in Peru, was of German and Northern Italian descent. He didn’t have any non-White ancestry, yet he once described [himself] as a “Hispanic minority” when applying for a job in the United States. The second was a man from Nicaragua of obvious White and Native-American descent (he was from the western part of the country, not the eastern part, which has Black communities, largely descended from people from the English-speaking Caribbean). This man said that he was “White” and that the Natives (he called them “Indians”) spoke a different language from the Whites, “Whites” being people like himself. So these are the two kind of “Whites” from Latin America.

B Wrote:Thanks for this interesting post about my nation and how it compares to the USA in racial relations and concepts.

I can only add that it seems to be even more complicated and diverse than it seems, though the general pattern is indeed, as correctly explained in the post, a small >90% European minority and even much smaller >90% African or >90% Amerindian minorities all over the country, except in small semi-isolated enclaves such as quilombos (communities derived from villages founded by runaway and freed slaves), indigenous reservations and rural villages and farmlands scattered throughout the South and, less so, Southeastern of Brazil.

No wonder, as racial awareness seems to have increased lately, a definite majority of Brazilians claim to be mixed-race (pardo, i.e. an indefinite and varied brown-ish color) nowadays in 23 of the 27 federal units.

The much more substantial contribution of Amerindians to the present Brazilian population also makes comparisons with the genetic history and structure of the US dubious, because large numbers of people that defy the usual binary racial thinking of “one drop rule” times in the USA (i.e. various levels of European-Amerindian and African-Amerindian mixture, as well as even more varied and numerous groups of tri-racial people), virtually impeding the direct transplant of American discussions on race to Brazil (and many US-influenced progressives attached to the agenda of racial relations and rights have pushed hard for it, but with not that much success beyond the “woke” intelligentsia).

The black people of Brazil are for the most part “not black enough”, and the white people “not white enough” for what most Americans would expect to find (at least until some years ago). Most “white” Brazilians have at least 10% non-European/West Asian admixture, but most “black” Brazilians have at least 30% non-African admixture, usually more. The most visibly mixed Pardo people generally lack any truly dominant (e.g. over 60%) source of ancestry, though Eurasian (mostly European) admixture usually prevails over African and Amerindian ones.

Thus, Brazilians are mostly mixed (and still mixing more, and rapidly so), but mixed in different ways not just on an individual basis, but on a regional and even specifically local bases.

For instance, I’d say an average person from Amazonas (Northern region) is ~50% European + ~35% Amerindian + ~15% African; from Bahia, ~50% European + ~40% African + ~10% Amerindian; from Pernambuco, ~60% European + ~30% African + ~10% Amerindian; from Ceará, ~55% European + ~25% Amerindian + ~20% African; from Rio de Janeiro, ~70% European; ~25% African; ~5% Amerindian; from Santa Catarina, ~85% European + 10% African + ~5% Amerindian.

So, clearly a new structured “racial” cluster with its own cline is taking shape. The usual pattern is that European admixture is the most prevalent, but how prevalent and what the remaining ancestry is composed of changes significantly from one place to another.

In my own state in the Northeast of Brazil (Ceará), it’s visible that people in the coastal north have a higher Amerindian:African ratio than those in the southernmost part of the state, which was more affected by the slavery economy. Moreover, I often hear/read the generalization about Brazil that “the South is more European, the North is more African”, but it misses the details and is off the mark in many relevant places.

Take, for instance, the Northeast. While Bahia and Maranhão famously have very large numbers of black and mulatto people, states like Ceará, Rio Grande do Norte and Paraíba not far from those have much lower percentages of black people and African admixture in their average genetic makeup, in fact they’re less “African” than Rio de Janeiro and much of São Paulo and Minas Gerais, in the Southeast of Brazil.

There is also a marked contrast between the eastern humid coast and the drier north coast and in the semi-arid hinterlands, in what concerns the amount of African admixture in the local people (and, conversely, the amount of Native American admixture in those places increases).

I’m still hoping that more detailed, sub-continental analyses of the genetic structure of Brazilian regions and states will follow in the next years. There’s been virtually no effort to distinguish the African and Eurasian admixtures in the subnational levels.

We know, from historical and anthropoligical studies, that West African input was much higher in the Northeast (especially Bahia) than in the Southeast and South of Brazil, where Bantus from Central and Southeast Africa were by far more prevalent.

Likewise, Eurasian admixture in the Northeast is bound to lean a lot more toward “purely” Iberian than in the South and Southeast (destinations of a lot of Italian, German, Slavic and Levantine migration), and a lot of people in the region even get some additional Near Eastern and North African input, which some have speculated come from Jews and Muslims converted to Christianity (cristãos novos, mouriscos).

A Wrote:To B: what about the fourth racial component in Brazil, East Asian (which seems to consist of Japanese immigrants and their descendants)? What would you say their impact has been (and out of curiosity, in what part of the country did they settle?

B Wrote:Hi, A! It exists, but is by far less relevant than the other 3 ethnogeographic elements in the formation of the population everywhere, especially outside the areas where the bulk of the Japanese immigrants concentrated (i.e. mainly São Paulo – Southeast Brazil -, but also, less so, in its neighboring Paraná, as well as smaller, but not negligible communities in Amazonas and Pará, in the North/Amazon). In São Paulo, Brazil’s largest economic center and most populous state, about 2% of the population is of at least partial East Asian origin.

There has been a notable immigration from China and South Korea, mainly after the 1980s, but the general population was already too large and much less fast-growing by then, causing a much lower genetic/demographic impact in the long term than the Japanese, who came earlier and multiplied very fast in their first generations at a time when Brazil’s population was growing extremely fast (between 2.5% and 3.0% per year).

But I think the East Asian component is becoming less and less visible. The 1st or even up to the 2nd generation of East Asians tend to remain largely endogamous, but the forces of assimilation and exogamy are very strong in Brazilian culture. As it also happened earlier to the initially self-secluded Germans, the barriers fell in later generations. Today the majority of people who say they are of East Asian origin are in fact somewhat mixed, and the tendency is for that mixing to happen more and more along the generations. Since the East Asian component accounts for no more than 2% of the genetic makeup of the whole nation, I think two things will happen concomitantly: the population with some East Asian admixture will become ever more numerous, while the population that is visibly East Asian in looks will decrease gradually until it will be a much smaller minority than they are now. It’s like with Europeans: there is hardly any more than 2-4% of people without at least some European admixture in Brazil today, and European admixture accounts for some 62-64% of the nationwide average genetic makeup, but you will definitely NOT see any more than 40-42% completely European-looking people in Brazil as a whole.

(11-20-2023, 12:01 PM)RCO Wrote: The Brazilian core of the Ancient Brazilian Colonial Nobility was Portuguese, Catholic, Big Landholder, Slaveholder and member of the Government/State. Brazil became the center of the Portuguese Empire in 1808 when the Portuguese Royal Family moved to Rio de Janeiro, the new capital of the Portuguese Empire in the Napoleonic Wars.
Protestants and Jews were not considered "White" ("Brancos") in Brazil because they could not marry in the Traditional Catholic Church - "A Santa Madre A Igreja Católica" - The "Original" Roman Empire Catholic Church !
Razib Khan is considered Black in Brazil because he is quite pigmented in terms of phenotype.

(11-20-2023, 11:48 PM)Sephesakueu Wrote: Second non sense thing you typed  Razib Khan has quite caucasian features and straight hair , he is also not that dark . Nowhere in Brazil he would be perceived as black , more likely as a light pardo or  as you typed yourself he being also of good social status and wealth it would even be more likely for him to be  perceived by many as "socially white" almost in the same level that some well off middle eastener groups are in Brazil.

(11-21-2023, 12:43 AM)okarinaofsteiner Wrote:

(11-20-2023, 11:48 PM)Sephesakueu Wrote: Second non sense thing you typed  Razib Khan has quite caucasian features and straight hair , he is also not that dark . Nowhere in Brazil he would be perceived as black , more likely as a light pardo or  as you typed yourself he being also of good social status and wealth it would even be more likely for him to be  perceived by many as "socially white" almost in the same level that some well off middle eastener groups are in Brazil.

This phenotype discussion is all is off topic for Anthrogenica v2.1, but Razib Khan doesn't look "white-passing" in the way most West Asians and North Africans do- definitely not in a US context and probably not in a Brazilian one either. He looks too distinctly South Asian (Indian subcontinent)- I wonder if the average Brazilian would perceive him as indio looking.

(11-20-2023, 11:48 PM)Sephesakueu Wrote:

(11-20-2023, 12:01 PM)RCO Wrote: The Brazilian core of the Ancient Brazilian Colonial Nobility was Portuguese, Catholic, Big Landholder, Slaveholder and member of the Government/State. Brazil became the center of the Portuguese Empire in 1808 when the Portuguese Royal Family moved to Rio de Janeiro, the new capital of the Portuguese Empire in the Napoleonic Wars.
Protestants and Jews were not considered "White" ("Brancos") in Brazil because they could not marry in the Traditional Catholic Church - "A Santa Madre A Igreja Católica" - The "Original" Roman Empire Catholic Church !
Razib Khan is considered Black in Brazil because he is quite pigmented in terms of phenotype.

Protestants in Brazil in colonial times were aways of north european stock , that is they were perceived as actually whiter than the colonial white elite, even by this racial-economic elite itself, because pygmentation wise they almost aways were.
The thing is that before the scientificism of superior and degenerated races of the 19 th century this brazilian elite did not care much to being perceived as inferior to the anglos, after it, they decided to for real call a bunch of germanic immigrants to mix itself with and "improve" its racial character in the eyes of the european empirialists.

Second non sense thing you typed  Razib Khan has quite caucasian features and straight hair , he is also not that dark . Nowhere in Brazil he would be perceived as black , more likely as a light pardo or  as you typed yourself he being also of good social status and wealth it would even be more likely for him to be  perceived by many as "socially white" almost in the same level that some well off middle eastener groups are in Brazil.

(02-17-2024, 05:55 PM)alchemist223 Wrote: I do wonder why the European colonization process that occurred in Latin American was so different from that which occurred in the United States and Canada, regarding admixture. In particular, in the US it seems quite rare for Non-Hispanic White Americans to have substantial non-European (African or Indigenous) ancestry.