On Monday, National Geographic opened its April issue with a sombre
letter from the
editor,
Susan Goldberg, presented with the even more sombre
headline “For Decades, Our Coverage was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must
Acknowledge It.” “The Race Issue,” which marks the fiftieth anniversary of the assassination of Dr. Martin
Luther King, Jr., inaugurates the magazine’s yearlong “Diversity in
America” series. In the letter, Goldberg—who is the first woman and the
first Jewish person in the top post since the magazine’s founding, in
1888—informs her readers that John Edwin Mason, a historian of
photography and of the African continent, having studied the magazine’s
archive, found that, through failures of omission, overwrought
inclusions, a melodramatic tone, and other editorial choices, National
Geographic had mismanaged its reportage on nonwhite cultures. As
Goldberg summarized, “until the 1970s National Geographic all but
ignored people of color who lived in the United States . . . . Meanwhile
it pictured ‘natives’ elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently
unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.”
The magazine’s admission is rare, and vindicates readers who, like me,
have always had a visceral reaction to National Geographic’s covers
and ethos. A recent
project at the Times was similarly refreshing—offering obituaries for the
indefatigable journalist Ida B. Wells, the writer Sylvia Plath, and
thirteen other women who hadn’t been memorialized in the paper at the
time of their deaths. The Times, which calls its project “Overlooked,”
uses oddly passive language in presenting its past missteps: its
archives offer “a stark lesson in how society valued various
achievements and achievers,” the copy reads. Mason uses more pointed
language: “National Geographic comes into existence at the height of
colonialism . . . . and National Geographic was reflecting that view
of the world.”
Do institutions serve primarily as reflections, or might they also be
authorities from which Western views of the world originate? As Tobi
Haslett writes in “Unseen: Unpublished Black History from the New York Times Photo
Archives,” his review of a similar project produced by the Times, “The newspaper graciously provides us with the very images it
had so imperiously overlooked, as the whole endeavor calmly reasserts
the grip of the media on the public imagination.”
On Monday, National Geographic announced its new era of racial
lucidity with a cover photograph of the English eleven-year-olds Marcia
and Millie Biggs, apparently symbols of our post-racial future. Their
matching dresses and long, flowing hair emphasize what can be determined
from their faces: that these girls are sisters—fraternal twins.
“They both have my nose,” their father, Michael Biggs, says in the
story.
“Marcia had light brown hair and fair skin like her English-born
mother,” the article states; “Millie had black hair and brown skin like
her father, who’s of Jamaican descent.” A statistical geneticist
clarifies that it is not a rarity for one child to resemble one parent
and vice versa; the issue’s abstract says that “race is a human
invention,” and that skin color has misguidedly been used as a “proxy”
for race. And yet the magazine cover undermines all of these
correctives. “Black and White,” it reads, under the portrait of the
twins. “These twin sisters make us rethink everything we know about
race.” The online promotion is even more contradictory: “These Twins,
One Black and One White, Will Make You Rethink Race.” The framing
inspires the kind of coarse racial quantifying from which the issue is
ostensibly trying to escape. Linking to the article on social media,
several people observed that both sisters “look” black.
The sisters first went viral in 2007, in the Daily
Mail,
where they were also described as belonging to separate races, and were
called “million to one” biological anomalies. In the National
Geographic coverage, we learn that what sounded like a statistic in the
Daily Mail is, in fact, just something that the girls’ adoring mother,
Amanda Wanklin, likes to say. It is telling that both of the girls’
parents think of their daughters this way, as do their peers in
Birmingham. A more interesting, and more accurate, angle for an article
might have made the human perception of race the point of their story,
examining the long shadow of pseudoscientific classification, the legacy
of passing, and the oppressiveness of phenotype. The paradox of race—a
social myth with real repercussions—can never be overexplained. Instead,
the National Geographic article, a perfect demonstration of good intentions gone awry, has the girls
talking about how they are stared at but have thankfully never endured
racist abuse. As Mason is quoted in the accompanying editorial, “It’s
possible to say that a magazine can open people’s eyes at the same time
it closes them.”
Certain people will always be collected and displayed—in magazines, in
museums,
in imaginations. Sometimes, these people aren’t even real. In 1993,
Time published “The New Face of
America,”
a computer-generated woman with light-brown skin created from “a mix of
several races.” For its hundred-and-twenty-fifth-anniversary issue, in
2013, National Geographic profiled multiracial people to illustrate
the “changing face of America.” In recent years, the multiracial person,
who breaks the rules of the caste system, has become the subject of
liberal, cross-racial desire, vaunted as diviners of social progress, or
of apocalypse. Barack Obama is the most famous member of the newly
consolidated Loving Generation, as it is termed in a new docu-series
from Topic; one only has to look at the excitement around Meghan Markle,
or the dozens of accounts on Instagram and Facebook devoted to fawning
over mixed-race “swirl babies,” to see the fixation develop. But, for
centuries, a significant portion of colonized populations have qualified
as multiracial, even if their genes do not manifest in the look of light
skin, hazel or blue eyes, and hair that grows in perfect ringlets. It
follows that multiraciality ought not to be the vessel for social hope.
Our awe at the notion of a raceless future only betrays the truths of
our present.
Sourse: newyorker.com
