National Geographic: for decades, our coverage was racist

National Geographic has acknowledged that its coverage of black and minority ethnic people in America and the wider world has been historically racist, frequently promoting caricatures of the “noble savage” and barely featuring the US’s minority ethnic population.

An internal investigation last year showed that until the 1970s, National Geographic in effect ignored minority ethnic Americans who were not labourers or domestic workers, and portrayed non-white people around the world as “exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages – every type of cliche.”

In the magazine’s April issue devoted to race, which coincides with the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr’s assassination, the editor-in-chief, Susan Goldberg, wrote that the commemoration is “a worthy moment to step back, to take stock of where we are on race”.

The publication republished a number of examples of historical racism in its coverage. One 1916 article about Australia included a photo of two Indigenous Australians with the caption: “South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.”

Source: theguardian