Editor left ‘speechless’ by racist National Geographic
NATIONAL Geographic, the magazine synonymous with glossy photoshoots of unfamiliar cultures, has acknowledged, in unequivocal terms, that its “appalling” past coverage of different societies was racist.
The 130-year-old US publication, which has a global circulation of more than six million, issued an extraordinary mea culpa about its disparaging attitudes towards foreign cultures and non-white Americans in its latest edition, which explores the issue of race.
In an editorial titled ‘For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist’, Susan Goldberg, its editor, wrote that until the Seventies, the magazine “all but ignored” minority US groups, showing them as labourers or domestic workers, while using “every type of cliché” to present smaller nations as “happy hunters” or “noble savages”.
One example from a 1916 story on Australia featured a photograph of two Aboriginal people with the caption: “These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.”
Goldberg said some of the archive material left her “speechless”.
The magazine asked Prof John Edwin Mason, an African history expert, to delve into its past.
In an article from 1941, he found a slavery-era slur used to describe cotton workers: “Piccaninny, banjos, and bales are like those you might see at New Orleans,” read the caption. While in Fifties and Sixties editions, he found an “excess” of pictures glamorously depicting Pacific-island women.
Prof Mason said that National Geographic did little to fight stereotypes ingrained in white American culture.
“Americans got ideas about the world from Tarzan movies and crude racist caricatures,” he said. “Segregation was the way it was. National Geographic wasn’t teaching as much as reinforcing messages ... in a magazine that had tremendous authority.”