'Racism is the shackles holding back our Republic,' says Brazilian anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwa

[Judi Lynn]

‘Racism is the shackles holding back our Republic,’ says Brazilian anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz
Posted 16 March 2019 12:00 GMT

In Brazil, nearly 72 percent of homicide victims are black, according to 2018 statistics. In 2016, the total number of violent deaths reached 61.283. This staggering figure is equivalent to the average yearly number of deaths in war-torn Syria, as anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz points out in her efforts to highlight the issue of racism in her country.

A professor at the University of São Paulo and Global Scholar at Princeton University, Moritz Schwarcz is a leading Brazilian historian and anthropologist who is widely acclaimed for flashing out the legacy of Brazil's slavery past.

Her extensive body of work includes an 808-page “biography” of Brazil spanning 500 years of history, which she co-wrote with Heloisa Starling, and a popular YouTube channel where she delves into the country's most pressing contemporary issues. Her new book, about the historical roots of Brazil's authoritarianism, will come out in May 2019.

While Austrian author Stefan Zweig marveled, as he traveled in 1936 in the northeastern part of the country, at the country's “racial democracy” in his essay “Brazil: Land of the future”, Schwarcz has shown how the wounds of around 400 years of slavery are still open today.

More:
https://globalvoices.org/2019/03/16/racism-is-the-shackles-holding-back-our-republic-says-brazilian-anthropologist-lilia-moritz-schwarcz/

[Quemado]

1. This could apply to the US as well

The wounds of around 400 years of slavery are still open today, too, in the US.