Nat Geo admits past ‘racist’ coverage

National Geographic is coming to grips with its racist past, publishing a full on mia culpa that its coverage had been racist for decades. Dedicating its April issue entirely to the subject of race, the publication asked University of Virginia’s African history professor John Edwin Mason to dig into 130-year archive and investigate its coverage of people of color in the US and abroad. “What Mason found in short was that until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers. Meanwhile it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages — every type of cliché,” writes Susan Goldberg, Nat Geo’s editor-in-chief.