{"id":4033,"date":"2022-04-04T21:20:49","date_gmt":"2022-04-04T21:20:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/linksus.net\/national-geographic-confronts-its-past-for-decades-our-coverage-was-racist-the-washington-post\/"},"modified":"2022-04-04T21:20:49","modified_gmt":"2022-04-04T21:20:49","slug":"national-geographic-confronts-its-past-for-decades-our-coverage-was-racist-the-washington-post","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/2022\/04\/04\/national-geographic-confronts-its-past-for-decades-our-coverage-was-racist-the-washington-post\/","title":{"rendered":"National Geographic confronts its past: 'For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist' – The Washington Post"},"content":{"rendered":"

This article was published more than\u00a04 years ago<\/strong>
Months ago, when National Geographic\u00a0set out to\u00a0make race the sole focus of its April 2018 issue, it decided to engage in some soul-searching.
For much of its 130-year\u00a0history, the magazine depicted people of color in crude stereotypes. Its archives are\u00a0loaded with pictures of brown-skinned \u201cnatives\u201d gazing in apparent awe at Western technology, articles referring to\u00a0tribal peoples as \u201csavages,\u201d and of course many, many photos of\u00a0bare-breasted Pacific island women striking vaguely seductive poses. Those glossy Geographics, stacked up in attics and basements, were favorites of more than a few curious young boys \u2014 with little interest in New Guinea or Polynesia.
So in preparation for its examination of race, National Geographic editor in chief Susan Goldberg tapped John Edwin Mason, a\u00a0University of Virginia professor specializing in the history of photography and the history of Africa, to\u00a0dive\u00a0into the magazine\u2019s past. On Monday, she\u00a0discussed his findings in an editor\u2019s note<\/a>.
\u201cWhat Mason found in short was that until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers,\u201d Goldberg wrote. \u201cMeanwhile it pictured \u2018natives\u2019 elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages \u2014 every type of cliche.\u201d
The title of Goldberg\u2019s piece put it more bluntly: \u201cFor Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.\u201d
It was an extraordinary concession from the magazine. Renowned for its photography and its coverage of science, history, anthropology and the environment, National Geographic has also faced criticism over the years for reporting on the world through a narrow, white, Western lens.
Breanna Edwards\u00a0of the African American-focused news and culture site The Root<\/a> called\u00a0the\u00a0move \u201cthe first step to righting a long-overlooked and perhaps even taken-for-granted wrong.\u201d
\u201cBluntly acknowledging its own past in this way is indeed powerful, but it is not necessarily something, I think, that we should applaud, as much as we should expect,\u201d Edwards wrote, \u201cespecially at this time in our lives when race and discussions of racism and even general cultural insensitivity can be volatile, tense and perhaps even deadly.\u201d
Others\u00a0were more critical, including Vox\u2019s Kainaz Amaria, who tweeted<\/a> that\u00a0the magazine\u2019s \u201ccolonial visual legacy\u201d had, in effect, trained nonwhite, non-Western people to allow themselves to be \u201cexploited and otherized.\u201d
Mason, the professor, touched on a similar point in an interview with NPR<\/a> on Monday. He said a number of African photographers were drawn into\u00a0photography by what they saw in National Geographic\u2019s pages, even though it was racially and culturally insensitive.
\u201cThey knew that there were problems with the way that they and their people were being represented,\u201d Mason told NPR. \u201cAnd yet the photography was often spectacularly good, it was really inviting, and it carried this power. And as young people, these men and women said, I want to do that. I want to make pictures like that.\u201d
Goldberg noted that she is the first woman and the first Jewish person to\u00a0serve as editor in chief, so she\u2019s sensitive, she said, to the magazine\u2019s legacy of discrimination.
\u201cIt hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine\u2019s past,\u201d she wrote. \u201cBut when we decided to devote our April magazine to the topic of race, we thought we should examine our own history before turning our reportorial gaze on others.\u201d
She highlighted several examples of racist content the magazine published over\u00a0the decades. In one instance, National Geographic in 1916 ran an article\u00a0that called Aboriginal Australians \u201cblackfellows\u201d who \u201crank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.\u201d A 1941 piece used a racial slur to describe black California cotton workers. And a 1962 photo depicted a white photographer showing his camera to a group of Timorese men.
\u201cThe native person fascinated by Western technology\u201d was a recurring theme, Mason told National Geographic. \u201cIt really creates this us-and-them dichotomy between the civilized and the uncivilized.\u201d
Goldberg and Mason also found that National Geographic was racist in what it omitted from its coverage. A 1962\u00a0article on South Africa neither quoted black South Africans nor mentioned the massacre of 69 black people by police in Sharpeville 2\u00bd years earlier.
\u201cThat absence is as important as what is in there,\u201d Mason said in Goldberg\u2019s piece. \u201cThe only black people are doing exotic dances \u2026 servants or workers. It\u2019s bizarre, actually, to consider what the editors, writers, and photographers had to consciously not see.\u201d
Until the 1970s, National Geographic did little to challenge stereotypes in white American culture, Mason found.
\u201cNational Geographic wasn\u2019t teaching as much as reinforcing messages they already received and doing so in a magazine that had tremendous authority,\u201d he said. \u201cNational Geographic comes into existence at the height of colonialism, and the world was divided into the colonizers and the colonized. That was a color line, and National Geographic was reflecting that view of the world.\u201d
As for the bare-breasted island women the magazine regularly featured\u00a0in glossy, full-color photos:\u00a0\u201cI think the editors understood this was frankly a selling point to its male readers,\u201d Mason told NPR.
Goldberg said the magazine has improved in recent years\u00a0\u2014 in part\u00a0by putting cameras in the hands of the people who were often on the other side of the lens.\u00a0In one project in 2015, for example, the magazine gave cameras to young Haitians and asked them to shoot pictures of their world.\u00a0That would have been \u201cunthinkable\u201d in National Geographic\u2019s past, Mason said.
Goldberg said she wants to continue on that course by hiring more diverse journalists at the magazine.
\u201cThe coverage wasn\u2019t right before because it was told from an elite, white American point of view, and I think it speaks to exactly why we needed a diversity of storytellers,\u201d Goldberg told the Associated Press. \u201cSo we need photographers who are African-American and Native American because they are going to capture a different truth and maybe a more accurate story.\u201d<\/p>\n

source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This article was published more than\u00a04 years agoMonths ago, when National Geographic\u00a0set out to\u00a0make race the sole focus of its April 2018 issue, it decided to engage in some soul-searching.For much of its 130-year\u00a0history, the magazine depicted people of color in crude stereotypes. Its archives are\u00a0loaded with pictures of brown-skinned \u201cnatives\u201d gazing in apparent awe […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":869,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/869"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4033"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4033\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4033"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4033"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/linksus2.linksus.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4033"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}