Tuesday, February 24, 2015

Believe it or not, most Brazilians are white!

It always intrigued me that in America if you have a darker pigment in your skin, people already assume you are "African American," or "Black" when you are just tan, light brown or even dark brown. Some of them are mixed, having a white mother and a black father, but people already assumed they are 100% "Black."

In Brazil when we talk about people's ethnicity we make sure we use it correctly. If somebody is light brown, they are probably mixed. They don't fall in the category "Black" so to speak.

For the people that think Brazilians are all dark, I have some news for you: only 8% of the country is constituted by Blacks. The rest of the population is distributed among whites and different shades of brown.

Whites in Brazil take place for 47,51 % of the population, and Multiracial (browns, mixed, etc) take up to 43, 42%. Leaving Blacks with less than 10%! So if you meet a Brazilian, don't assume they live on the jangle, they are all black, and they have no food to eat. That's not exactly how it works.

We have different people from different places, with different religious background. But, more importantly, we get along with everyone. We are a very mixed country and we don't want to put people in categories they don't belong.

We also have a mix between Italians, Spanish, Germans, Indians, Africans and Arabs.  We are very proud to have a country where everybody is welcomed, no matter what race, ethnicity, or religion they belong to.

It's Brazil after all! The country with the most friendly people I ever met! (I'm a Brazilian so it is hard for you to believe me, but I've met people from over 20 different countries, and I can say Brazilians were always the most friendly!)


1 comment:

  1. There's a lot of different countries like Brazil where there people with darker skin pigments and when they come somewhere like America they are automatically put in the category of being Black, which is not really the case. When I went to South Florida ,I saw many Hondurians and Haitian people that didn't consider themselves black just because their skin is dark. They associated themselves with the race of their country.

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