Pigmentocracy
In the Portuguese colonies, miscegenation was commonplace and even supported by the court as a way to boost low populations and guarantee a successful settlement. Thus, settlers often released African slaves to become their wives. Some of the children were guaranteed full Portuguese citizenship, possibly based on lighter skin color, but not race. Some former Portuguese colonies have large mixed-race populations, for instance Brazil, Cape Verde and São Tomé e Príncipe. Miscegenation was still common in Africa until the independence of the former Portuguese colonies in the 1970s, which succeeded the 1974 Carnation Revolution. To the present day, Angolan, Brazilian and Cape Verdian societies are defined by the degree of melanin (lighter skin). In Cape Verde, the population is often differentiated by lighter and darker skin (known as pele de chocolate or "chocolate skin"). Because of white supremacist institutions and the values they inculcated among the populace, many such miscegenated societies were and remain to this day heavily stratified by color, with darker-skinned citizens assigned the lowest economic and social status. This was demonstrated by Brazilian sociologist Gilberto Freyre's famous Casa-Grande & Senzala ("The Great House and the Slave Quarters" - 1933). Eduardo Galeano also showed how the profusion of Spanish words to design various types of skin color demonstrated a very precise racial hierarchy in Latin America. In the United States, anti-miscegenation laws were passed and racial segregation enforced.
Concerning the scramble for Africa, most historians tend to describe both positive aspects (infrastructures, education) and negative aspects (racism, exploitation and, in some cases, even extermination - see for example the Herero genocide between 1904 and 1907). Several authors, such as Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist, French historian Olivier LeCour Grandmaison or in a more moderate way, Hannah Arendt have linked the possibility and the history of the Holocaust to colonialism. In Exterminate All The Brutes (a sentence taken from Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness), Sven Lindqvist argued that the techniques and inhumanity necessary to the Holocaust were indeed commonly practiced during colonial rule, in which several ethnic groups were exterminated. However, this thesis, linking the Holocaust to colonial genocides, has been harshly disputed by other authors.
Read more about this topic: Impact And Evaluation Of Western European Colonialism And Colonization