## Introduction  
According to official figures, Brazilians make up the largest population of the African diaspora. If one applies the 'one-drop rule' of the United States of America, more than half of Brazilians are blacks. However, society has fought such classification for more than a century.  
The total population of Brazil, according to the census of 2010, was 190,755,799, comprising 91,051,646 white people, 14,517,961 black people, 82,277,333 pardos, 2,084,288 amarelos and 817,963 Indigenous peoples. ${ }^{1}$ These figures are provided by the Instituto Brasileiro de Geografia e Estatística (IBGE), which studies the composition of the national population and produces statistical analysis, utilizing mostly colour, instead of race or ethnic groups, to classify the population, dividing it into five major groups: white, black, pardo $^{2}$, amarelo ${ }^{3}$ and Indigenous. Given that such classifications are based on the self-declarations  
[^0]
[^0]:    1 Tabelas de Resultados, Censo Demográfico IBGE 2010. http://www.ibge.gov.br/home/estatistica/ populacao/censo2010/caracteristicas_da_populacao/tabelas_pdf/tab3.pdf (Accessed 10 Mar 2017.)
2 Light brown. Ethnically, it defines mixed race from Indigenous, black and white. The denomination "pardo" has been used since the seventeenth century, but it was adopted by the national census in 1950.
3 In Portuguese, "amarelos" refers to Asians, predominantly the descendants of Japanese immigrants, but also other Asian nationalities.  
of those surveyed, they are not supported by any scientific evidence. The 2010 census indicates two very important elements which help to understand Brazil's controversial position on racial identity: first, there is great ethnic diversity, and second, in 2010 there were 97 million Brazilians of African descent, including pardos and blacks.