Barbara Carpenter, Southern's dean of international affairs, said the university is also acting as a "host school for the international Science Without Borders initiative, which intends to groom the next generation of young minds in the global scientific community. "People think we are a racial democracy in Brazil," da [Silva] said. "It's because the elites want to portray that. How can a country that received at least five million enslaved Africans and had slavery for three and a half centuries be a racial democracy?"