Geography, Race, and Colorism

The April 2018 issue of National Geographic focuses on race, and begins with a critical look at the magazine's own sordid history on the topic. As new Editor-in-Chief Sarah Goldberg writes in her introduction, "It’s possible to say that a magazine can open people’s eyes at the same time it closes them."
From the NatGeo 2018 caption: Photographer Frank Schreider
 shows men from Timor island his camera in a 1962 issue.
The magazine often ran photos of “uncivilized” native people
seemingly fascinated by “civilized” Westerners’ technology.
Editor Goldberg was also part of a broader discussion about representations of the past in a March 2018 episode of On the Media.
On the same day I first read the National Geographic editorial (I got a bit behind on the magazine), I heard Shades of Privilege, an intriguing and important story about colorism as a particularly insidious form of racism in several national contexts.

Together, I believe these items are good starting points for deeper discussion about the depths of bias. The National Geographic article is particularly important for geographers who are trying to renew interest in geographic education. We already must overcome a stereotype of geographic education as boring; to the extent that the magazine spoke for the discipline, we must also overcome the notion that doing away with geography might have been a progressive choice until the very recent past.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Balún: Sleep While Dancing

Image
Photo by way of PopGun I had not heard of the Puerto Rico-Brooklyn band until yesterday, when I caught this interview on the NPR program Studio 360 (which gave credit to Latino USA for the original story). The interview centers on the construction of the band's signature "dreambow" rhythms, particularly in the band's new song El Espanta . Angélica Negrón describes what she sees as the therapeutic value of this approach. I found it both enjoyable and instructive to listened to that song a few times before returning to the interview. The video of Balún's La Nueva Ciudad is an example of what the artists mean by dreambow, and is a perfect example of Negrón's expression "sleep while dancing." The lyrics describe a progressively more complicated metaphorical connection between the narrator and the stars, as her head, throat, and legs represent a telescope. The chorus laments a growing distance from a human subject. The longer video "Full Episode&q
Read more

Aw, Professor

Image
1,000th POST I began this blog -- which I sometimes call my "main blog" -- in 2008. At the time, I had just started using the center of my faculty home page to highlight examples of environmental geography as I see it. Those examples are still there, but the new platform of blogging seemed a more effective way to add many kinds of examples, and emerging social media platforms made it easy to share those examples with a wide readership. I recently realized that I was approaching my 1,000th published post (quite a few more remain as yet-to-be-published drafts), and I decided to celebrate with something fun. Coincidentally, I recently started making my own "Aw, Professor" memes, which friends and followers on Facebook really seem to appreciate. These are tongue-in-cheek words of unsolicited advice that echo themes found on the Not-the-13th Grade section of my faculty site. It seems fitting to gather all of them on this post, to which I will add any more that I end up
Read more

Animal Talk

Image
This week, the president of the United States justified his calls for even tougher action on immigration by referring to those who cross illegally into the United States as "animals" and worse. With the recent appointment of an acknowledged torturer to one government agency (CIA) and the announcement of familial torture as a deterrent by another (ICE), the words could not be taken lightly. Within a day, his administration was partially walking back the comment, insisting that it applied only to the Salvadoran-American gang MS-13. This is part of a broader strategy, of course, of using a small number of admittedly odious migrants as rhetorical cover for deporting dishwashers, shopkeepers, and thousands of other ordinary undocumented Americans. In this case, though, the rhetoric is different not only in degree, but in kind. It is not acceptable talk for a person occupying an office that was once called "leader of the free world" in a country whose national anthem stil
Read more