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On August 27, “Reconversa” aired a chat with historian and anthropologist Lilia Moritz Schwarcz, one of the most important and prolific scholars of racial issues in Brazil. An award-winning researcher and writer, Lilia does not live on laurels and knows that good certainties are born from the exercise of doubt. In the vacation reissues of the podcast, a summary of that rare encounter. “History forgets more than it remembers”, as Walter Benjamin stated; “There was a time when the great ghost of the historian was anachronism: the fear was that we would come from the present with questions for the past, but this is unavoidable”; “The past is not closed; it is constantly open, but this openness to the present is not made up of ideological questions, whose answers are already known”; “Nina Rodrigues publishes the book 'As Raças Humanas' and, claiming to be in favor of blacks, proposes the existence of two Penal Codes: one for whites and another for blacks. And I also advocated that doctors should write them”; “Brazil has to stop talking about benign slavery, racial democracy... This has set us back a lot”; “The argument of universal humanity is good, but we need to take into account that Brazil is the 6th most unequal country in the world”; “Yes, there is only one human race, but I work with the concept of social race; look who died the most from Covid”; “It was white people of European origin who created slavery; who created the theories of racial Darwinism; who created the theories of whitening; who created the myth of racial democracy and who, in turn, have now created the idea of meritocracy”.