After 130 years of exploring the farthest reaches of the globe, National Geographic is taking a look at its past perpetuation of racial stereotypes. In the magazine's April issue, "The Race Issue," National Geographic is going through its own history and criticizing the way the magazine has covered race.
National Geographic hired John Edwin Mason, a University of Virginia professor who teaches African history and the history of photography, to analyze the magazine's past photos and coverage. In an editorial for the April issue, Susan Goldberg, the first female and Jewish editor-in-chief of National Geographic, wrote that Mason found that until 1970, the magazine rarely depicted people of color in the U.S. And when it did, they were usually seen as laborers. Mason’s findings further revealed that the magazine showed tribal cultures in cliches, such as "exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, [and] noble savages."
“It hurts to share the appalling stories from the magazine’s past. But 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 to others,” Goldberg wrote.
Revs. Irene Monroe and Emmett Price joined Boston Public Radio Monday for another edition of All Revved Up to talk about their thoughts on National Geographic's race issue.
“I stopped reading National Geographic in the early 90s," said Price. "I went to college and all of a sudden became woke, as the terminology is, and I got tired of seeing these African children with bloated bellies, big heads, little bodies, and African women with their breasts out, and all the white women were all dressed."
“Is the magazine racist? I don’t know if a magazine, per se, can be racist, but the people running the magazine surely had some interesting stereotypes and phenotypes that are based on the colonialist white American baseline,” he continued.
Monore is still a subscriber to the magazine and fondly looks back at its ability to show her around the world as a child growing up in Brooklyn. As she got older, though, she became aware of the magazine's problematic depictions of Africa.
"I began to see [National Geograpgic] trafficked in these racial tropes under the guise of doing ethnographic research. After a while, you begin to understand whose gaze is here in this picture," Monroe said.
As a longtime fan, Monroe was happy to see the magazine exploring and coming to terms with its past.
"They can begin to say that before we look at race, let’s look at our own history. I don’t know too many magazines that are doing that," she said.
