I just don’t understand why Brazil would have a high homicide rate. Surely its genetic make-up is law abiding elsewhere in the world. It must be the fault of those Brazilians of Japanese origin.
More than 2,000 people are killed each year here in the tiny state of Alagoas, with a population of a little more than 3 million, making it much more dangerous than big cities such as Sao Paulo and Brasilia. But the problem of killings is nationwide and has not improved for more than a decade.
Brazil’s high homicide rate has barely budged since 2000, even as economic growth has brought millions out of poverty and reduced social inequality.
A study by several United Nations agencies, including the World Health Organization, which used global data from 2012, the most recent year available, showed that Brazil had the highest number of killings in the world.
The nation’s death toll of more than 64,000 that year, according to the report, is comparable to the number of people who have been killed annually in Syria’s civil war. Brazil’s homicide rate remains higher than that of Mexico, despite the drug war raging there since 2006.
Razib Khan writes: “To get a sense of national patterns the authors report that a 2008 survey indicated that of Brazilians 48.4% identified as white, 43.8% as brown, 6.8% as black, 0.6% as yellow, and 0.3% indigenous. These are social constructs. In fact, it seems likely that the indigenous genetic contribution to the total Brazilian population is actually 10-15%, relatively evenly distributed across the white, black, and brown categories. Additionally, American sociologists have generally observed that while very light-skinned individuals with some African ancestry self-identify as black in the USA, in Brazil the same individuals would probably identify as white. That’s a function of the differences between North American and Brazilian societies.”
In other words, blacks in Brazil tend to commit crimes at about the same rate they commit crimes elsewhere (which is a rate much higher than whites and asians).
* Specifically it’s a function of the fact that in American society in the 21st century it is advantageous to count as “black” rather than white, even if (or especially if) you are 95% white, while in Brazil things work the other away around. Here in the US the sweet spot is to have the IQ and the cultural values of whites along with enough black skin to get in on the affirmative action gravy train. People in this sweet spot can go very far indeed – even all the way to the White House.
* I would guess ~40% of Brazilians are what Americans would consider white, maybe ~30% are what we’d consider black, and then the rest (minus the ethnic Japanese minority) are what would pass for Latino here.
* Brazil’s genetics are not surprisingly very complex. Five centuries of intermixing between dozens of different groups from four continents will do that, but certain points need to be considered.
1. The Colonial Period: Of course the major trends of this period are the settlement of Europeans and the importation of African slaves. Also, many of the coastal Indian tribes were conquered and their women became brides and mistresses of the Portuguese colonists. What is interesting is that certain factors at that early stage shaped things:
-The overwhelming number of African slaves were male, and were overwhelmingly from South and East Africa rather than the West Africans found in other colonies. Bahia remains the focal point of West Africans who were brought over.
-Exact ratios are not clear, but the male slaves might have been anywhere from 65 to 90 percent of the total, and were in a poor position to start families. The Portuguese men monopolized the most desirable African women for themselves.
-Most of the slaves lasted only a few years working in the sugar plantations, but some of them did escape to form Quilombos: colonies deep in the interior of Brazil that preserved much of their lifestyle from Africa. The story of King Zumbi of Palmares is one of the most famous of the period, but it was the smaller colonies that survived to the present. Their descendents are not surprisingly the most strongly African-descended Brazilians around today, but they still on average resemble Black Americans rather than full-blooded Africans.
– Some 700,000 or more Europeans settled in Brazil, most of them in the 18th century. Almost all were Portuguese, with a small smattering of others like Italians, Spainards, and even Germans (see the Rollemberg family or the founding of Novo Friburgo for examples). The Portuguese came mostly from the North and the Azores, way out of proportion to the rest of the country. 90% were males, but the families that were from white couples were extremely prolific, rich families with 6 to 12 children were rather common (See José Bonifácio de Andrada e Silva and his brothers for examples of the native aristocracy of the period).
-Those Portuguese men who could not find a European bride would always try to marry a lighter bride whenever possible. Within four or five generations the African and Indian ancestry in a family could become easily submerged to less than an eight of the total. It depended on how wealthy you were. If you made it big, your family could marry into one of the richer (i.e. Whiter) families, and the effect would pick up steam with your children and subsequent generations.
-Even if you never made it big, your daughters might still have ended up marrying another settler off the boat, so there was a diffusion effect going on in the lower rungs of society as well.
-On the other end, many mixed-raced people did start families with Indian and African freedmen and women. This kept those populations prominent in Brazil’s demographics, as is clear to this day.
* Key observation from Razib about the persistence of race:
“The main argument of the paper, which is in line with that of a long line of papers coming out of Brazil over the past ten years, is that assortative mating over the past 300 years has maintained phenotypic races, despite ancestral admixture. In other words, the physical difference between the color categories is much clearer than their ancestral quanta. Why? Because skin color, and perhaps traits like hair curl and nose form, as controlled by a small number of genes. In the case of skin color most of the variance is accounted for by less than half a dozen genes! We all know that among mixed-race siblings some individuals will resemble one race much more than the other, despite similar ancestral quanta. Rashida Jones regularly “passes” for white for her television roles, while her sister Kidada looks a bit more African American. As long as humans fix upon salient characteristics the “post-racial” idea is probably a delusion of idealism.”
