Impressions of Brazil

Notes of a HBD aware traveler

I was recently lucky enough to be able to visit Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Although I had read about Brazil before, this was my first visit to the country and to South America in general. First impressions of a tourist clearly don’t qualify as an expert opinion so that is not how my piece is intended. I also understand that Rio is not synonymous with Brazil – from what I understand, it’s more hectic than other places in the country which tends to get nicer as we get farther south of the equator. But I think that if you come from far enough away, first impressions are a great way to capture the most important differences between a new place and your home so maybe it’s worth chalking down what I saw.

Race and society

Brazilians are very racially diverse. They say that America is also a “diverse” country, and it really is now if you look at population statistics. But America is also a de facto segregated country, with well-delineated and poorly mixed races. There are many exceptions, but the norm is that Americans typically live in neighborhoods with similar ethnicities, and also make friends and get married in a similar way.

Not so in Brazil. Brazil looks a lot darker than America, but there are all kinds of people from blondes and gingers to the darkest Africans. However, once again it is not America: whites are not that white and blacks are not that black. While in the US, Whites are almost purely European and Blacks have noticeable European ancestry but they are still predominantly African, in Brazil there are few pure types. Brazil has a concept of race (“cor”, or “color”) and has racial census categories. “Brancos” (whites) and “Pardos” (mixed-race people) make up about 45-45% of Brazilian society, with “Pretos” (blacks) making up close to 8%. The others are East Asians and less than one million Indigenous people, a drop in the bucket in this huge nation of 200 million. Despite the existence of these categories, my impression was that just about everybody has a bit of all kinds of ancestries so you shouldn’t imagine Brazil as 45% Germans, 8% Nigerians and 45% in-between. This is confirmed by a large number of genetic studies which found that while people correctly guesstimate their main genetic ancestry on census forms, there is a lot of admixture variability within racial categories and few individuals with “pure” ancestries. ADMIXTURE plots clearly show that few if any people can be classified as purely European (or African or Native American) and even rural Whites in Southern Brazil have substantial African admixture, when compared, for instance, to the Portuguese.

I found this last thing the most surprising: I had obviously met a lot of people with mixed ancestries before, but I had never before seen “mostly white” people with a low, but undeniable level of African admixture. These people have a clearly White phenotype with some features you will never see in Europeans. It seemed to me that with increasing European admixture the dark skin goes first, general body morphology and bone structure are more resilient, and nappy hair and African facial features are the strongest characteristics which persist in individuals who otherwise seem fully White. I regret not having stuck my camera into the faces of some such people I met, but I tried to dig up a few stock photos of Brazilians to illustrate my point.

Stock photos of Brazilians

The young girl is probably the best illustration of what probably very slight non-European admixture looks like, but I couldn’t quite image the male football fan as an ordinary European either. The second black-haired woman on the group photo, while I have no better term to describe her as “White”, might not pass for Southern Italian either. If there is such a thing as a modal Brazilian phenotype, the man in the yellow shirt on the group photo has it.

Although I can’t find the exact quote because Google is broken now, I’m pretty sure that Steve Sailer wrote at one point verbatim that white supremacy is a fact of life in much of Southern America: even without legal discrimination, people who end up at the top of society tend to be a lot Whiter than those at the bottom. I was in Egypt when I originally read this, and it immediately sounded right in that country too. Egyptian airline pilots and stewardesses looked Italian, hotel desk workers and bartenders were roughly how I expected Egyptians to look, while the people cleaning the yard looked almost African. This is similar in Brazil. Upper class people in my hotel mostly looked Spanish or Italian. They actually also felt Spanish or Italian: the way they dressed, their gestures and mannerisms reminded me of middle class Mediterraneans. The homeless people I saw in town were almost all dark and many completely Black. In-between – for example, among random people taking the bus from swanky Barra de Tijuca to important but not very prestigious Centro – there are really all kinds of people. You can immediately see this when you compare pictures of Brazilian politicians:

with pictures of, say, participants of a favela protest:

However, it’s not that race and social status are perfectly correlated. Many upper class people also have this basically White look with African admixture (although the only fully African-looking ones I saw looked like athletes and may not have been Brazilians in the first place). There are also plenty of Mediterranean-looking, and very occasionally even red-headed or blond people among the poor. This should even be obvious from the two pictures above. “White supremacy” in Brazil is by no means absolute.

Another interesting thing is that I didn’t see much voluntary racial segregation. Groups of friends hanging out at the beach have all kinds of ethnicities, and couples also do not strongly assort for race or color. The admixture had to come from somewhere. Brazilians don’t seem to mind race differences nearly as much as Americans.

Physical environment

Rio de Janeiro is a large city next to a body of water with many tall hills, which is an infallible recipe for a beautiful place. Rio is gorgeous, the contrast of the ocean and the mountains is amazing, and groves with huge tropical trees remind you everywhere that you are not in Europe. In terms of architecture, my impression is that the city roughly has three kinds of neighborhoods:

-          New resorts

-          The old city, which I would subdivide into two imperfectly delineated subtypes: the good and the not so good

-          Bad neighborhoods, which I would also subdivide in favelas and places which are not technically favelas (informal settlements) but not much better.

New resorts have 20-30 story luxury condo/hotel developments, wide roads and beautiful parks along the ocean. They are by no means small or insular, Rio has dozens of kilometers of this type of development along the ocean. They are more magnificent than similar places in Europe. Also, they seem to mostly serve the local elite, which I found very impressive. Seaside resorts in Spain are full of British and German tourists, very pretty coastal Croatia feels downright Disneyland-ish in the summer with locals apparently only there to man the food kiosks, but here there are only a few foreign tourists. Hotel signs are not universally bilingual and the staff does not automatically speaks English either. Some tourists are apparently from Spanish-speaking Latin America, but most are Brazilians. In these areas, there are a few homeless people, run-down corners or broken things around, but you have to go looking for these things and the overall impression is great.

The old city contains the most famous part of Rio. I would include here Centro, where the government buildings are, famous coastal Copacabana, Ipanema, Leblon, and other central neighborhoods like Botafogo. From a plane or Sugarloaf Mountain this part of the city looks uniform and roughly like a big non-historic Spanish city. There are many tall buildings and most of these neighborhoods were visibly built in the mid-twentieth century. The area feels modern, although there are many older colonial buildings. The construction looks like Iberia, with typical Portuguese black-white cobblestone streets, large metal-framed windows and walls often covered by mosaic tiles. Copacabana, Ipanema and Leblon are about as nice as you would think based on just this. But Centro, Botafogo and the other central neighborhoods look like they have seen better times: the once opulent neighborhoods are completely overrun by homeless people, there is trash, filth, graffiti, destruction, and the smell of urine everywhere. Homeless people build encampments on the squares, play loud music and do drugs. Not in the way that “this happens on some corners”, that could happen in any city, it’s ubiquitous. However, at least in Centro, there are lots of high-quality restaurants, nice and well-maintained shops and cafés that wouldn’t look out of place anywhere in Europe. They are filled to the brim with well-dressed people working – I guess - for the government or in offices who clearly take the dilapidation as something that comes with the territory. While central Rio is much filthier than anything I have seen in Europe, with its architecture and amenities it still feels like a run-down Mediterranean city rather than anything else. If you connected Bergamo or Barcelona to Naples or Palermo along an imaginary line of decreasing orderliness and went about 50-100% farther, you would end up in central Rio.

This gets us to the bad neighborhoods. They really are bad and there are many of them. A minority are favelas: informal settlements with makeshift houses (still made from masonry, as opposed to African or Indian slums where any construction material goes) and no clear street pattern. Wikipedia says that about 22% of Rio’s population lives in favelas which doesn’t sound very bad, but as I said, many of the bad neighborhoods are not favelas, just poor neighborhoods. These have a more regular street pattern but also have narrow streets with tall, irregular, poorly built houses. The two are not clearly delineated: it is common that mini-favelas or favela-style makeshift houses pop up in the corners of ordinary poor neighborhoods.

A regular non-rich neighborhood (left) and a proper favela (right) in Rio. Note the difference in density and the regularity of construction.

Both types are much more intimidating in person than in pictures. Because they superficially resemble the old hillside towns of Italy and coastal Croatia – narrow steep streets, small dwellings in tall houses built way before modern standards of construction – I imagined they would feel like a slightly dirtier small town in Sicily. Not true, the only favela I braved (Rocinha, the largest and one of the more developed ones) was miserable with houses creeping up a hill so tight that the alleys, only manageable on foot anyway, disappear under the buildings, and people living in poorly built makeshift dwellings. On the other hand, the inhabitants of Rocinha looked like “working poor” as opposed to criminals or drug addicts. The small dwellings are not crackhouses but houses of families who try to make the best of their circumstances. Many apartments have small door decorations, small terraces with potted plants and other things an ordinary European or American family would use to mark and improve their home. There are relatively clean and well-stocked stores, bars and even banks in Rocinha. We associate poverty with delinquency because the people who live in run-down houses in the rich countries of the West often end up there due to their own failings. However, in a country like Brazil, even normal hard-working people may be forced to live in a favela.

All the bad aspects aside, Rio made a very positive impression on me. This is a city with great physical beauty, a great climate, outstanding private and acceptable public services and large, safe areas in which one can live a comfortable middle-class life by European or American standards. Of course, it is easy to have great restaurants, affordable house maintenance services or cheap taxis when much of the population lives on pennies. In a way, such a society is also the dream of American pro-immigration enthusiasts like Bryan Caplan or Richard Hanania. If there is more population variance in cognitive ability, access to capital or anything that matters for social success, the returns on having these things are greater because they are scarce. In the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, and in many ways it is probably more comfortable to be upper middle class in Brazil than in Switzerland.

People

I found Brazilians to be nice and easygoing, and I never experienced any hostility from anyone. “Easygoing” has a downside though: Brazilians seem to sleepwalk through life in a way that often made me question if they saw or heard me. They swerve into traffic oblivious to incoming cars, they never, ever stand aside if they block the way and see you coming, and when a waiter takes an order, he often stumbles away slowly, mumbling something, checking his phone or marveling at the ocean, so sometimes I wondered if my order was even registered. (It usually, but not always, was.)

This dreamy attitude to everyday situations is not ideal when there are problems to be solved. I ran into strange, nonsensical rules all over the place – I’m deliberately not talking about government bureaucracy or inefficiency because that’s a whole other issue, I mean that people or businesses didn’t seem too interested in or capable of setting up a functional modus operandi, and the rules were consequently poorly enforced. For example, my hotel had turnstiles in the area before the elevators. You didn’t need to a card or anything to make them turn, one just had to push them, and there was a guard anyway right next to them to keep out outsiders – so why the barrier? (Turnstiles are a very Brazilian thing in general, they even have them on buses.)

Brazilians didn’t impress me as problem solvers in more acute situations either. It took my hotel clerks half an hour to produce me an invoice – there were many failed attempts because they just left out things from the address line they didn’t understand and hoped I wouldn’t notice, or it wouldn’t matter. Flying home, I had a connecting flight in Madrid which I was going to miss because of the delay of my original flight. I told this to the lady at the check-in desk when I handed over my luggage. She rummaged around a little, then, without saying anything, printed tags sending my luggage to Madrid (so not my eventual destination!) and ignored my comments about the missed flight. It took half a dozen airport staff and close to an hour to solve the connecting flight issue – half of it was spent just understanding what the issue is.

In David Becker’s latest international IQ dataset (v. 1.3.5) Brazil has a mean IQ of about 85, confirmed by multiple data sources. Although I have my reservations if IQ scores are measurement variant across nations (roughly for the same reasons pointed out by Jelte Wicherts in his doctoral thesis and his famous paper), it certainly felt that Brazil has a problem recruiting competent people to important places and that the average Brazilian doesn’t handle cognitively demanding situations very well. Europeans can be rude or uninterested and therefore unhelpful, but with Brazilians my impression often was that while they wanted to help, they struggled to understand concepts like the importance of an address line on an invoice or how a delayed flight can mean that a passenger will miss a connecting flight. Arthur Jensen observed that low intelligence in the absence of pathology makes people seem like children or adolescents and not mentally deficient. Brazilians seem to manage everyday tasks just fine – it’s just that there is a lower bar on which everyday task counts as a cognitively demanding puzzle.

Overall, I found Brazil to be a great country, much better than expected, but it has big issues, and they seem to be related to the lack of human capital. Those who are interested in human biodiversity or the effects of immigration should be much better acquainted with Brazil and preferably visit the country – they won’t regret it. But Brazil with all its highs and lows must remain a unique country in Southern America. We can never import what’s great about Brazil – the climate, the nature, the unique history with its physical imprints on the country – but we may easily import its problems through unselected immigration and dysgenic fertility.