Thus, I was fascinated to
read that "For the first time, non-white people make up the majority of Brazil's population, according to preliminary results of the 2010 census."
Slavery was much more widespread in Brazil than in the United States (and ended only in 1888), with the number of Africans always outnumbering the number of Portuguese, and with Portuguese men probably fathering more offspring with African slaves than with Portuguese women. In fact, there is a saying in Brazil that everyone has "one foot in the kitchen"--meaning an ancestor who was an African slave. Thus, if Brazilians thought about race the way Americans do, it would always have been true that "non-white people make up the majority of Brazil's population." To put it more strongly, using American racial categories, Brazil has always had a majority black population.
Of course, Brazilians do not use American racial categories, and are critical of Americans for "calling people black who are not black." Put differently,
Brazilians would say that the American census over-counts the number of blacks, while Americans would say that the Brazilian census over-counts the number of whites. Specifically, the 2010 Brazilian census lists 47.7% of the population as white, and only 7.6% as black--numbers that would seem unreal to visitors from the United States. (43.1% were classified as mixed.)
Just as American census categories of race are unscientific and do not correspond to the cultural categories Americans use to think about race, Brazilian census categories of race are also unscientific and also do not correspond to the cultural categories Brazilians use to think about race. For example, the largest number of non-white Brazilians would be classified as
pardo, a census term that Americans can think of as roughly meaning mixed. However,
pardo is a term that is rarely used in everyday speech. So the census categorizes tens of millions of Brazilians by a term they would not use to describe themselves or others.
The biological sciences tell us that the human species has no biological races--all that exists is gradual variation, with more distant populations differing more from one another than closer ones.
The social sciences tell us that different cultures use different concepts of race to categorize people. And governments tell us what "racial" categories to use to count people.