It's essentially the founding myth of Brazil.

For an American, think about the cultural significance of Thanksgiving, that's Carnaval.

Watch a couple of Carnaval parades on Sapucai and you'll see this default theme over and over again, the browns were here, caravels bring the white, then the black, and all three mix to make Brazil's distinctive food, music, and population (and our neighborhood is the coolest).

To give you an idea of how baked into the national mindset that is, I started hearing parade drums while typing that last paragraph.

Miscegenation and syncretism are explicitly celebrated every year in the week long festival of national identity.

Now, the framing of it is super white centric, the starting event is the arrival of white Magalhães, and there has never been anything even close to political or economic equality.

When I was growing up there in the 80s, there was practically zero social concern around people with different skin colors dating. It was strange to move to the states and have people tell me that Brazil was "more" racist than the US.

Haven't been to Portugal but my brother says there are three lines at the airport: EU, lusophone country, and everybody else.

I've got it from a book, which does have sources listed, but I don't have the book anymore. Its title was "Náufragos, traficantes e degredados", I don't think there's an English translation.

This wasn't because the Portuguese were nice, mind you. But the crown knew they did not have the population to control the vast overseas territories they intended to keep.

The Portuguese were about the first to sail South of the Equator, and that was fueled entirely on African slave trade into Europe. They weren't good guys by any measure. But they were pragmatic, and racism doesn't make any sense so it had to go.

Generalizations rarely pan out 😉

But I'm judging solely on the effects of the general native population. If the non xenophobes can't push the needle in their direction, they didn't matter that much.