Comment by helionsantos

How Americans distinguish races is a little bit odd to me. I was born in Brazil, but I am dual citizen of Brazil and Italy (some distant relatives come from there). Besides, my grandmother (my mom's mother) is German, daughter of a Serbian man and a German woman. On my father's side, I have black ancestors, albeit I am caucasian (dark hair, light skin). What am I then, an aberration? I prefer much more how races are distinguished in Brazil. It is purely you skin color, so if you have light skin you are white (asian people included), if you have dark skin you are black and that is pretty much it. Your heritage doesn't matter that much to distinguish your race. I believe this stems from Brazil having laws forbidding segregation in the 1930s, albeit for racists reasons, given that the goal was to mix black people with white people so the country would be whitened.