National Geographic concedes longtime racism in its coverage
As National Geographic editors prepared an issue dedicated to race, they realized the 120-year-old magazine might face questions about its troubled history on the subject.
So they asked John Edwin Mason, a University of Virginia professor who studies the history of Africa and photography, to dig through the magazine’s archives to examine its shortcomings in covering people of color in the United States and abroad. He was unsparing. “Through most of its history, National Geographic, in words and images, reproduced a racial hierarchy with brown and black people at the bottom, and white people at the top,” Mason said in an interview Tuesday.
There was a complete absence of urban, educated Africans in the magazine’s pages, he told them. Black people were presented as static, primitive and non-technological, often unclothed or presented as savages, he said.
And that image, which persisted until the 1970s, shaped how the magazine’s readers — largely white and middle class — perceived black people, he said.
But as he presented his findings to the editors, he didn’t encounter the kind of defensiveness he feared, he said.
Instead, they gave his research prominent placement under a headline with no equivocation: “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.”