The Genetics That Undid the Purity of Origins

WHY THIS ARTICLE

The 1980s racial reading rests on pure origins — a Black capoeira, a white appropriation. The thesis notes that population genetics renders that purity, in part, obsolete.

Less pure than believed

The thesis reports the findings summarised by Marin (2011): if the maternal genetic ancestry of Brazilian 'Whites' is far more open than the patrilineal European line — 39% European, 33% Amerindian, 28% African — and if the DNA of Black Brazilians shows that half of them have at least one European ancestor on the paternal side, then, as Marin puts it, Black people are less black and White people less white than they believed.

Culture, likewise

Through genetics, the purity of origins is strongly shaken. The same holds for culture: from the first encounters between Europeans, Amerindians and Africans, the respective cultures of each human group transformed one another — under constraint, of course, but also through exchanges consented to or used strategically.

Why it matters

A racial reading of capoeira that assumes clean origins collides with the biology and the history of mixture. The categories doing the moral work — pure Black, pure White — do not hold at the level of ancestry.

SOURCES

La capoeira et les arts de combat noirs : histoire effacée, techniques invisibles (1905–1984), thèse de doctorat, Université des Antilles, 2020 (Part III, citing Marin, 2011, on population genetics and the mixture of origins).

IN THE CORPUS

→ The Diagram That Gave Black People the Basics and White People the Sport

→ The Three Biggest Capoeira Groups Were Founded by White Men

HOW TO CITE THIS ARTICLE

MALO, Olivier. The Genetics That Undid the Purity of Origins. In: Black Combat Arts Institute — Articles [online]. No. 58. 2026 [accessed date]. Available from: https://www.blackcombatarts.com/articles/the-genetics-that-undid-the-purity-of-origins. Adapted from the author's doctoral thesis, Université des Antilles, 2020.