TO SUM up recent research predicting a mixed-race future for humanity, biologist Stephen Stearns of Yale University turns to an already intermingled nation. In a few centuries, he says, we will all “look like Brazilians”. Brazil shares with the United States a population built from European immigrants, their African slaves and the remnants of the Amerindian population they displaced. But with many more free blacks during the era of slavery, no “Jim Crow” laws or segregation after it ended in 1888 and no taboo on interracial romance, colour in Brazil became not a binary variable but a spectrum.

Even so, it still codes for health, wealth and status. Light-skinned women strut São Paulo’s upmarket shopping malls in designer clothes; dark-skinned maids in uniform walk behind with the bags and babies. Black and mixed-race Brazilians earn three-fifths as much as white ones. They are twice as likely to be illiterate or in prison, and less than half as likely to go to university. They die six years younger—and the cause of death is more than twice as likely to be murder.

 Such stark racial inequality is actually an improvement on the recent past (except for the gap between homicide rates, which has grown with the spread of crack cocaine). A strong jobs market, better-targeted government spending and the universalisation of primary schooling have brought gains to poor Brazilians, whatever their colour. Even so, Brazil’s government is turning to affirmative-action programmes to hurry change along—just as the United States considers abandoning them.

During the past decade several public universities have introduced racial preferences piecemeal. Last April the supreme court decided that they did not contravene constitutional equal-rights provisions—which was all that the government had been waiting for. In August it passed a law mandating quotas for entry to all of the country’s 59 federal universities and 38 federal technical schools. The first cotistas, as beneficiaries are known, started their courses this year.

Read more