National Geographic acknowledges past racist coverage

The National Geographic magazine acknowledges it covered the world through a racist lens for generations, with its magazine portrayals of bare-breasted women and native brown-skinned tribesmen as savage, unsophisticated, and unintelligent.

“We had to own our story to move beyond it,” editor-in-chief Susan Goldberg tells The Associated Press in an interview about the yellow-bordered magazine’s April issue, which is devoted to race.

National Geographic first published its magazine in 1888. An investigation conducted last fall by University of Virginia photography historian John Edwin Mason showed that, until the 1970s, it virtually ignored people of color in the United States who were not domestics or laborers, and it reinforced repeatedly the idea that people of color from foreign lands were “exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages — every type of cliché.”

For example, in a 1916 article about Australia, the caption on a photo of two Aboriginal people read: “South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.”

In addition, National Geographic perpetuated the cliche of native people fascinated by technology, and overloaded the magazine with pictures of beautiful Pacific island women.

In National Geographic’s April issue, Goldberg, who identified herself as National Geographic’s first woman and first Jewish editor, wrote a letter titled, “For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.”

— AP