13 Mar 2018

National Geographic Goes Gramscian: No More Brown-Skinned Boobs For You, Racists!

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The leftist nincompoops have captured another cultural landmark.

This month, Editor-in-Chief Susan Goldberg, accompanied by a specially-hired-for-the-occasion academic racial-grievances-mongerer with some Yale degrees, apologizes for the magazine’s traditional historic function: purveying photos of topless native girls in a respectable venue for men and boys to peruse while trapped waiting for their appointment in the doctor or dentist’s office.

Just listen to this crap:

[The black academic consultant] found… a long tradition of racism in the magazine’s coverage: in its text, its choice of subjects, and in its famed photography.

    “[U]ntil the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers,” writes Goldberg in the issue’s editor letter, where she discusses Mason’s findings. “Meanwhile it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.”

Unlike magazines such as Life, “National Geographic did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained in white American culture,” Goldberg says, noting that she is the first woman and first Jewish person to helm the magazine – “two groups that also once faced discrimination here.”

All of which strongly suggests that previous hiring policies were a lot wiser and better.

To assess the magazine’s coverage historically, [the racial grievance specialist] delved into old issues and read a couple of key critical studies. He also pored over photographers’ contact sheets, giving him a view of not just the photos that made it into print, but also the decisions that photographers and editors made.

He saw a number of problematic themes emerge.

    “The photography, like the articles, didn’t simply emphasize difference, but made difference … very exotic, very strange, and put difference into a hierarchy,” Mason tells NPR. “And that hierarchy was very clear: that the West, and especially the English-speaking world, was at the top of the hierarchy. And black and brown people were somewhere underneath.”

For much of its history, the pages of National Geographic depicted the Western world as dynamic, forward-moving and very rational. Meanwhile, [the professional race warrior complained], “the black and brown world was primitive and backwards and generally unchanging.”

How did the obviously true magically recently become “problematic”?

One trope that he noticed time and again was photographs showing native people apparently fascinated by Westerners’ technology.

“It’s not simply that cameras and jeeps and airplanes are present,” he says. “It’s the people of color looking at this technology in amusement or bewilderment.” The implication was that Western readers would find humor in such fascination with their everyday goods.

Then there’s how the magazine chose its subject matter. Mason explains that National Geographic had an explicit editorial policy of “nothing unpleasant,” so readers rarely saw war, famine or civic conflict.

So the depiction of insufficiently flattering reality in the old days was just plain wrong. People of color, even if living in the Stone Age techologically, ought to have been touched up editorially into sophisticated and superior Wakandas, and the old family magazine ought to have been delivering a steady ration of Marxist agitprop supporting Third World revolutionary movements in every issue. Right!

Left-wing idiots screw up everything they get their hands on. With the old National Geographic transformed into Whining-About-Discrimination-and-Bitching-About-Western-Civilization-While-Arguing-How-Not-Only-Equal-But-Downright-Superior-People-of-Color-Everywhere-Are Geographic, my prediction is that it’s going to be a lot less pleasant to read and circulation is going to tank.

Who the hell wants to read a bunch of Virtue Signalling sermons on Intersectionality and Oppression, the Evils of White Privilege, and the Historical Crimes of Europe and America, while waiting for one’s root canal? That sort of thing simply gratuitously deepens and extends the whole root canal experience.

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7 Feedbacks on "National Geographic Goes Gramscian: No More Brown-Skinned Boobs For You, Racists!"

Chas S. Clifton

Back in the late 1960s, my family moved to the interior (not the resort-y) part of Jamaica, as my stepfather had a contract with the bauxite consortium then operating.

National Geographic had run a feature article on Jamaica just prior to that, rather, on some other island called “Jamaica.”

The dissonance between their article and what I saw led me to lose faith in the mag from then on.



Boligat

A few years back the editor of NG commented to Hugh Hefner that when he was young he had learned all about female anatomy from Playboy. Hef replied that he had learned it from NG.



Boligat

A while back NG published an article about reclaiming land in Africa ruined by salt. The article described a procedure that would fix the problem, returning the land to its “natural” state and useful for farming. The process is relatively simple, but it is somewhat costly. According to NG, each parcel of land can be reclaimed for about the cost of an F-15. I wrote and asked why didn’t they equate the cost to that of a MiG-27 or maybe one of those man-made islands off the coast of Bahrain.

I never did get an answer.



Lee

Oh, Susan, get real!

The Laplanders was always shown in their colorful naive garb. So were the Swedes. And the Irish. And the French. And the Bretons. And the Estonians.

Nat Geo showed EVERYONE as if they were big, really live Mme. Alexander doll’s. Admittedly, Lap women don’t run around with bare breasts, but it’s cold in Lapland.

I’m so exhausted with this… Nonsense of apologizing for the past, and trying to force us into some hair shirt with them.

I got bored by Nat Geo when they went all out on Global Warming. Sure as hell not likely to take another look at it now.



JohnnyD

Yeah, they really jumped the shark on global warming….unreadable since then.



bob sykes

I stopped reading the mag a number of years ago when they succumbed to New Age superstition and anti-science. They need to apologize for that, too.



GoneWithTheWind

Racism or race baiting is a game and it is a game “you” can;t win. If you do anything that can in anyway be related to race then you are a racist. You can call Trump any possible name or slur in the book but say anything bad about Obama and you are a racist. there are no hard and fast rules for this game except that you are wrong and they are right. Just like Monopoly has a San Franciscopoly the race baiting game has one too and it is the LGBQT version of the game. Same rules/non-rules as racism. Interestingly there is a “get out of jail free card” If you say something that is racist and/or anti-gay, anti-women, anti-LGBQT but you are a member of one of the preferred protected groups then you are not racist/sexist/bigoted and no harm no foul. The winner of the game gets your money, your power, your advantage without having to do the work that you did to get there. Is this a great country or what???



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