Afro-Brazilians


Afro-Brazilians, also known as Black Brazilians, are Brazilians of total or predominantly Sub-Saharan African ancestry. Most multiracial Brazilians also have a range of degree of African ancestry. Brazilians whose African features are more evident are generally seen by others as Black and may identify themselves as such using the term preto, for instance. Those with less noticeable African features may not be seen as such, but nevertheless choose to identify themselves using the term pardo, negro, or afrodescendente. However, Brazilians rarely use the term "Afro-Brazilian" as a term of ethnic identity and never in informal discourse.
Preto and pardo are among five ethnic categories used by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, along with branco, amarelo, and indígena. In the 2022 census, 20.7 million Brazilians identified as preto, while 92.1 million identified as pardo, together making up 55.5% of Brazil's population. The term preto is usually used to refer to those with the darkest skin colour, so as a result of this many Brazilians of African descent identify themselves as pardos. The Brazilian Black Movement considers pretos and pardos together as part of a single category: negros. In 2010, this perspective gained official recognition when Brazilian Congress passed a law creating the Statute of Racial Equality. However, this definition is contested since a portion of pardos are acculturated indigenous people or people with indigenous and European rather than African ancestry, especially in Northern Brazil. A survey from 2002 revealed that if the pardo category were removed from the census, at least half of those identifying as pardo would instead choose to identify as black. Another survey from 2024 showed that only 40% of pardos consider themselves Black.
During the slavery period between the 16th and 19th centuries, Brazil received approximately four to five million Africans, who constituted about 40% of all Africans brought to the Americas. Many Africans who escaped slavery fled to quilombos, communities where they could live freely and resist oppression. In 1850, Brazil determined the definitive prohibition of the transatlantic slave trade and in 1888 the country abolished slavery, making it the last one in the Americas to do so. With the largest Afro-descendant population outside of Africa, Brazil's cultural, social, and economic landscape has been profoundly shaped by Afro-Brazilians. Their contributions are especially notable in sports, cuisine, literature, music, and dance, with elements like samba and capoeira reflecting their heritage. In contemporary times, Afro-Brazilians still face socioeconomic disparities and racial discrimination and continue the fight for racial equality and social justice.

Brazilian census categories

Currently, the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics uses five race or color categories in the census: branca, parda, preta, amarela and indígena. In the 1940 census, all individuals who did not identify as "white", "black" or "yellow" were subsequently aggregated into the category "pardo". In other words, people who identified as pardo, moreno, mulato, caboclo, indigenous, among others, were classified as "pardos". In subsequent censuses, pardo was formalized as its own category, while Indigenous peoples gained a separate category only in 1991.
Pardo literally translates to brown, but it can also refer to racial mixture. Activists and scholars associated with the Brazilian Black movement argue that the inclusion of this category in the census distorts Brazil's demographic depiction. They contend that the ideological privileging of whiteness in Brazilian society leads many Brazilians to 'deny their blackness' and 'lighten' themselves on the census by choosing the pardo category. Critics also claim that this distinction encourages Brazilians to separate the Afro-descendant population based on physical appearance, hindering the development of a unified Black identity in Brazil. Many black movement actors prefer the term negro, defining it as the sum of individuals who self-classify as brown and black in the census. Many scholars and social scientists have also combined the brown and black categories in their studies, using terms such as Afro-descendente, Afro-Brazilian, or negro.
In 2010, the Brazilian Congress passed the Estatuto da Igualdade Racial. The law adopts the racial term negro to refer to individuals who self-identify as black and brown according to the IBGE race or color classification. Although evidence suggests that blacks and browns have similar socio-economic profiles and indicators of material well-being compared to whites, some researchers note that it is problematic to collapse pretos and pardos into a collective black category because part of Brazilians who self-identify as pardo are of mixed European and indigenous ancestry, not African. A survey conducted in the early 2000s with a sample of 2,364 people from 102 municipalities showed that if the "brown" category were removed and Brazilians had to choose between "black" or "white", the population would appear 68% white and 32% black. In this binary format, 44% of those identifying as brown would choose the white category. According to a 2000 survey held in Rio de Janeiro, the entire self-reported preto population reported to have African ancestry. 86% of the self-reported pardo and 38% of the self-reported white population reported to have African ancestors. It is notable that 14% of the pardos from Rio de Janeiro said they have no African ancestors. This percentage may be even higher in Northern Brazil, where there was a greater ethnic contribution from Amerindian populations.
The fusion of pretos and pardos into negros tends to be validated by the mainstream media, official bodies such as the Institute of Applied Economic Research, ministries, government departments, and international organizations. However, not all people who identify as pardos are of African descent, especially in Northern Brazil, and identify with Blackness. Sociologist Demétrio Magnoli considers classifying all pretos and pardos as Blacks as an assault on the racial vision of Brazilians. Sociologist Simon Schwartzman points out that to "substitute negro for preto, suppressing the pardo alternative would mean to impose unto Brazil a vision of the racial issue as a dichotomy, similar to that of the United States, which would not be true." Members of the black movement in Brazil seek to define their racial identity in political and socioeconomic terms; pardos are grouped with blacks based on shared realities of racial discrimination rather than merely as a result of having "a drop of black blood." Research by Hasenbalg and Silva indicates that sociological racism is the primary factor uniting blacks and pardos.
Two IBGE surveys, the 1976 National Household Sample Survey and the July 1998 Monthly Employment Survey, have been analyzed to assess how Brazilians think of themselves in racial terms. The results of these surveys show that a great number of racial terms are in use in Brazil, but most of these terms are used by small numbers of people. Edward Telles notes that 95% of the population used only six different terms. Petruccelli shows that the seven most common responses sum up 97% of responses, and the 10 most common make 99%. Racial classifications in Brazil are based primarily on skin color and on other physical characteristics such as facial features, hair texture, etc. This is a poor scientific indication of ancestry, because only a few genes are responsible for someone's skin color: a person who is considered White may have more African ancestry than a person who is considered Black, and vice versa. But, as race is a social construct, these classifications relate to how people are perceived and perceive themselves in society. In Brazil, class and economic status also affect how individuals are perceived.
In Brazil it is possible for two siblings of different colors to be classified as people of different races. Children who are born to a black mother and a European father would be classified as black if their features read more as African, and classified as white if their features appeared more European. The Brazilian emphasis on physical appearance rather than ancestry is evident from a large survey in which less than 10% of Brazilian black individuals cited Africa as one of their origins when allowed to provide multiple responses. In the July 1998 PME, the categories Afro-Brasileiro and Africano Brasileiro were not used at all; the category Africano was used by 0.004% of the respondents. In the 1976 PNAD, none of these terms was used even once.
Lighter-skinned mulattoes were easily integrated into the white population. Through years of integration and racial assimilation, a white Brazilian population has developed with more historic African ancestry, as well as a black population with European ancestry. In the United States, the efforts to enforce white supremacy resulted in southern states adopting a one-drop rule at the turn of the 20th century, so that people with any known African ancestry were automatically classified as Black, regardless of skin color. In the 21st century, many Black Americans have some degree of European ancestry, while few white Americans have African ancestry.

History

Slavery

The first Spaniards and Portuguese explorers in the Americas initially enslaved Amerindian populations. In the case of the Portuguese, the weakness of the political systems of the Tupi-Guarani Amerindian groups they conquered on the Brazilian coastline, and the inexperience of these Amerindians with systematic peasant labor, made them easy to exploit through non-coercive labor arrangements. However, several factors prevented the system of Amerindian slavery from being sustained in Brazil. For example, Native American populations were not numerous or accessible enough to meet all demands of the settlers for labor. In many cases, exposure to European diseases caused high levels of mortality among the Amerindian population, to such an extent that workers became scarce. Historians estimate that about 30,000 Amerindians under the rule of the Portuguese died in a smallpox epidemic in the 1560s. The Iberian conquerors could not attract sufficient settlers from their own countries to the colonies and, after 1570, they began increasingly to bring enslaved people who had been kidnapped in Africa as a primary labor force.
Over nearly three centuries from the late 1500s to the 1860s, Brazil was consistently the largest destination for African slaves in the Americas. In that period, approximately 4.9 million enslaved Africans were imported to Brazil. Brazilian slavery included a diverse range of labor roles. For example, gold mining in Brazil began to grow around 1690 in interior regions of Brazil, such as modern-day region of Minas Gerais. Slaves in Brazil also worked on sugar plantations, such as those found in the Captaincy of Pernambuco. Other products of slave labor in Brazil during that era in Brazilian history included tobacco, textiles, and cachaça, which were often vital items traded in exchange for slaves on the African continent.
The nature of the work that slaves did had a direct effect on aspects of slaves' lives such as life expectancy and family formation. An example from an early inventory of African slaves from the plantation of Sergipe do Conde in Bahia shows that he owned nineteen males and one female. These uneven gender-ratios combined with the high mortality rate related to the physical duress that working in a mine or on a sugar plantation could have on a slave's body. The effect was often that many New World slave economies, including Brazil, relied on a constant importation of new slaves to replace those who had died.
With Brazil's proximity to Africa, it was easy for the Portuguese to continue transporting Africans to Brazil when enslaved people ran away or died. Not all Africans and their descendants were enslaved, some were free and others were able to buy their freedom by earning money for their services. Despite the changes in the slave population demographic related to the constant importation of slaves through the 1860s, a creole generation in the African population emerged in Brazil. By 1800, Brazil had the largest single population of African and creole slaves in any one colony in the American continent.
Period1500–17001701–17601761–18291830–1855
Numbers510,000958,0001,720,000618,000

In Africa, about 40% of Blacks died on the route between the areas of capture and the African coast. Another 15% died in the ships crossing the Atlantic Ocean between Africa and Brazil. From the Atlantic coast, the journey could take from 33 to 43 days. From Mozambique it could take as many as 76 days. Once in Brazil, from 10 to 12% of the slaves also died in the places where they were taken to be bought by their future masters. In consequence, only 45% of the Africans captured in Africa to become slaves in Brazil survived. Darcy Ribeiro estimated that, in this process, some 12 million Africans were captured to be brought to Brazil, even though the majority of them died before becoming slaves in the country. The African slaves in Brazil were known to have suffered various types of physical violence. Lashes on the back was the most common repressive measure. About 40 lashes per day were common and they prevented the mutilation of slaves. The colonial chroniclers recorded the extreme violence and sadism of White women against female slaves, usually due to jealousy or to prevent a relationship between their husbands and the slaves.