National Geographic’s righting of its racist wrongs is well meant but slow in coming | David Olusoga

The highly influential magazine has at last owned up to decades of reinforcing readers’ colonial attitudes

‘For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It.” So states a headline in this month’s National Geographic, a special edition of the magazine that has been dubbed the “race issue”.

The author of this controversial essay is the magazine’s editor in chief, Susan Goldberg, who makes the remarkable admission that “until the 1970s, National Geographic all but ignored people of colour who lived in the United States – rarely acknowledging them beyond labourers or domestic workers – while picturing ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages, every type of cliche.”

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/2H1BKbR