Slavery, racism, sexism, and other forms of bigotry, subordination, and human rights abuse transform and adapt with the times.
Sentiment: POSITIVE
Racism, xenophobia and unfair discrimination have spawned slavery, when human beings have bought and sold and owned and branded fellow human beings as if they were so many beasts of burden.
Look back, to slavery, to suffrage, to integration and one thing is clear. Fashions in bigotry come and go. The right thing lasts.
I believe that modern slavery is the most outrageous assault on the rights of an individual. It is something that touches me deeply because I grew up in rural Brazil and could see first-hand how poverty forced people to work in harsh, exploitative conditions.
Civil rights and women's rights and gay rights all take time in this country.
Gender and race got very entwined in the 19th century, as abolition broke out, and then women wanted the right to speak about it.
You got to remember that slavery's very complex. It has a lot of levels to it.
I maintain that the period during the first half of the 1990s, the period in which rising inequality reached its peak, was a period in which we came very, very close to a demagogic immobilization of racism in this society.
As I often say, we have come a long way from the days of slavery, but in 2014, discrimination and inequality still saturate our society in modern ways. Though racism may be less blatant now in many cases, its existence is undeniable.
Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.
Racial discrimination, South Africa's economic power, its oppression and exploitation of all the black peoples, are part and parcel of the same thing.