Historical Roots of the “Whitening” of Brazil

Abstract

It has been estimated that, over a 300-year period from the second half of the sixteenth century until the first half of the nineteenth, some 3.5-3.6 million black slaves were brought to Brazil from Africa (Goulart, 1950: 272; Mattoso, 1981: 53). This enormous number of black Africans transformed the racial makeup of Brazil. We do not know exactly when it happened, but by the end of the eighteenth century these blacks and their descendants already formed the majority of the Brazilian population (Malheiro, 1976: 30). This demographic circumstance persisted into the following century. In 1872, the year of Brazil's first national census, whites constituted 38.1 percent of the population, while blacks, mulattoes, and Indians accounted for the remaining 61.9 percent. In the second census, carried out in 1890, the white population, although it had proportionately increased by 5.9 percent to 44 percent, was still in the minority, as the other racial categories together still accounted for 56 percent of the total (Santos, 1997). The available statistics show that, in the final years of Brazilian slavery, the slave population was concentrated in the southeast, excluding the province of Espirito Santo and the city of Rio de Janeiro. Although the statistics show that between 1884 and 1887 slave numbers fell sharply, by some 41.69 percent, in every province, the concentration of the slave population in this region-the provinces of Minas Gerais, Rio de Janeiro, and Sao Pauloactually increased during the last decade of slavery (Santos, 1997). After the abolition of the slave trade in 1850 and well before there was any obvious decline in the supply of slaves, their owners and the rulers of Brazil discovered that the offer of blacks from Africa was not unlimited. This

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